How to Build a Rabid Fan Base with Austin Rief of Morning Brew

Courtland Allen: 0s

What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from indiehackers.com and you're listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. On this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.

All right. I'm here with Austin Rief, the co-founder of Morning Brew. Morning Brew is an incredibly impressive business. On your website you describe it as the daily email that makes reading the news actually enjoyable. I think last year you generated over $20 million in revenue with just 33 employees. Is that accurate?

Austin Rief: 49s

That is more or less correct. I think 33 was probably halfway through the year, but something like that, yeah.

Courtland Allen: 55s

Those are pretty crazy numbers. What's even crazier is that. You started this thing as a side project in college in 2015, and you never raised any money from VCs.

Somehow, it's turned into this behemoth media company that's generating millions of dollars. You have millions of subscribers. It's a pretty long way to go basically from people who weren't necessarily imagining in the beginning that you could ever build something in this big.

Austin Rief: 1m 17s

It's funny you mentioned that. I think that is the reason why it got to be so big because we didn't plan things out at the beginning. I think a lot of consumer businesses in general, they're too, they're like fake upfront. It's very staged or especially to raise VC money, or you have to build community early. You have to build this brand early.

For us, it was so authentic because it was just us. We were just creating content. You know, we thought this was a good idea, but we never thought it'd be a big business. I think that is why it's succeeded because we started it when I was a sophomore in college.

We had two years where there was no pressure to make money, no pressure to, is it a company? Is it not? It was just, oh, it's a college thing. Because of that, it just grew, there was no pressure. It grew so authentically. I think that is so often when people think about Morning Brew, they think about starting in 2017 or 2018, we went full time.

If not for those two years though, where we didn't have to pay ourselves salaries, we didn't have to care what people thought. You know, we had small mistakes, didn't matter if we had a few number of subscribers. If not, for those two years, we wouldn't be where we are. I think it's actually a feature, not a bug.

Courtland Allen: 2m 30s

I think about this with Indie Hackers too, because I joined Stripe four years ago today. Today's my Stripe-iversery. I got a little ping on Slack, and it's funny because the goal has always been growth, make Indie Hackers bigger and more impactful, better. But when you're thinking about that constantly, and you're kind of worried about your performance, you tend to put deadlines on things.

You tend to say, okay, I'm going to only do things that can work in a really big way in the next three to six months, or six to nine months or something like that, which excludes a whole bunch of stuff that you could be doing that might just make your product better or more interesting and more useful because you're trying to hit these metrics.

I'm super curious what you were doing during these two years of college that wasn't like pedal to the metal, we care about what some VCs think, and it was just authentically figuring out your business helps you out later on.

Austin Rief: 3m 12s

Yeah. There were two things. Let's talk about growth and then let's talk about product expansion.

In terms of growth, we had no money. So, it had to grow organically. We had to figure out organic growth. It's the classic thing where sometimes, you know, people say, oh, a company got overcapitalized. They threw money at a problem. We had no money to throw at the biggest problem, which is distribution.

I'm a big believer that distribution is, in the product-distribution war, they're both obviously very important, distribution in my mind is more important. We had to figure it out. So, we went to clubs and classes at Michigan, and we would just pitch it. And we, I first realized, no one's paying attention.

It's the beginning of an Econ 101 class there's, 500 kids in here. We only have a thousand subscribers. We can grow our subscriber base 50% simply by getting all these people signed up and we pitch our hearts out and people will be interested. I go to my computer and refresh, I have like two new subscribers, and we'd be like, well, what do we do?

So, we started passing, this is a true story, we'd pass around a piece of paper and get everyone to write their email down. After class I'd sit outside the lecture hall and just manually type in everyone's email on the landing page one by one. It's the classic, it's Paul Graham do things that don't scale before I even knew who Paul Graham was.

But it was, it wasn't do things don't scale. It was do the only things we could have possibly done. Because of that, we knew we had product-market fit because people weren't churning. That's the growth thing.

The product thing, we had people, big media execs reaching out to us. Remember, 2015 BuzzFeed’s raising tens or hundreds of millions Vice’s raising hundreds of millions. These people raising a ton of capital and people are saying, hey, create video, create this, create that.

We're out there being like, we're just going to write our newsletter. You know, we're going to write our simple newsletter. It's just funny because in hindsight it was just so simple. Like we thought it was so complicated what we were doing, and it was so easy to look at the business now versus then.

Courtland Allen: 5m 7s

There's a book I just finished reading called “Made to Stick.” It's all about how to craft a message or a story that actually sticks with people over time and then allows them to share it or that just stands the test of time.

They got I think five or six principals, but the very, very first one that they say you need more than any other principal is just simplicity. Way too many people try to craft a message that's got 15 moving parts and it's got 10 different value propositions or whatever. You know, you're making a newsletter and it's for people like X and people like Y and people like Z. They're like, no, you gotta get rid of all that.

It's super hard when you're the one building a product or doing research and you have to communicate to people why it's valuable to throw stuff away because you've put so much time and effort into this newsletter, so much time and effort into your research.

You want people to know all the bells and whistles. But for them, they describe basically finding the core of your idea as being the most important thing that if nothing else gets communicated, you need to communicate this and then literally just cut everything else, no matter how painful it is.

For the Morning Brew, I was looking at some of your tweets, you talked about how you want your newsletter to be one thing, which is you wanted to write it in a conversational tone for intellectually curious readers. How did you decide on having a conversational newsletter?

Austin Rief: 6m 17s

That was the origin. It was really my co-founder. He was watching his friends struggle to learn about the business world and there are all these resources out there.

You walk into Michigan, where we went to business school, there were a stack of 20 Wall Street Journals every day. No one would read that. People always talk about user research. Didn't take user research to realize why people weren't reading the journal.

It's the same reason I wasn't reading journal. It was dry. It was long. It was boring. What's the opposite of that? Fun and engaging. There were other companies at the time just starting to create content, The Skimm being the biggest one, in a really strong tone.

We didn't want to copy The Skimm’s tone at all, but we said, what if we could take what they were doing for pop culture, for women, but do it our way? What is our way? The interesting thing was Alex and I, we weren't the best writers. We couldn't, you know, we could write a sentence or two, or maybe a paragraph in this tone, but we couldn't write the whole newsletter in this tone, but we could very much see eye to eye.

Day one, we knew, you know, we knew what we were talking about. We knew at the tone was. It was just figuring out like, you know, the journal is so boring, we can do it better.

Courtland Allen: 7m 26s

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What I like about it is the fact that you weren't discouraged by the fact that other people were already sending emails telling people about the news.

It wasn't so much, hey, we need to differentiate by starting at a completely different product that no one's ever done before. It was more like, hey, we already know that people like the news, people need the news, but we're just going to do it slightly differently. We're going to find our own niece. We're going to see what other people were doing poorly and we're going to do that well.

I think that's kind of a universal principle. Almost everybody I talked to on the show who's doing really well is solving kind of a tried-and-true problem that was already being solved well before them, by, you know, a different company in a different way. They just found a way to differentiate.

Austin Rief: 8m 3s

I mean, there are a couple of other types of products, right? There are products who are doing things completely new, like completely revolutionary. There are people who are doing things better, just a little bit better in a lot of different ways. If you do something a little bit better in terms of delivery.

We weren't the first people sending out a newsletter, but most media companies, they monetize via web traffic. Their newsletter had one goal: to get people back to their website. Our newsletter had one goal and it was to keep people in the newsletter. That allowed us to create a different product that really wasn't that different, but it had a lot of things that actually made it very different.

Courtland Allen: 8m 36s

So tell me more about this process of trying to get college students to sign up for a newsletter. Cause even now, thinking about it, when I was in college, I wasn't really concerned about the news. I remember I found out about Hurricane Katrina like a week and a half after it happened, because I was just focusing on schoolwork and hanging out with my friends and parties.

I just, I didn't care about the news. I don't think I would've signed up for a newsletter on the news. What were you doing besides just going to classes and getting everybody to write down their emails so that you could add them to your list?

Austin Rief: 9m 2s

It starts with who we targeted. We didn't target every college kid. We target the kids who needed this. We started with kids who were prepping for job interviews.

We pitched it like, hey, you have to prep. You're spending hours a week, might as well read this it's five minutes a day and you seem a lot smarter. Starting with those kids and starting with the kids who were the central nodes, the president of business schools, the president of business clubs, the guy, or the girl who everyone would just look to, if we get them reading, they would share it with all their friends.

Courtland Allen: 9m 36s

Okay. So, super targeted, you're talking the influencers of college.

I watched this video last year. It was basically, how do you do SEO. They were talking about growing your blog. Part of it was like you can grow through something that's got sort of accumulative traffic like SEO, but also a lot of people were seduced by this idea of virality.

They had a research study in there that broke down how virality actually works. Most of us think that the way the virality works is you share something with one person and then they share it with two people and they share with four people and eight people and it spreads. Pretty soon, the entire internet is reading your amazing blog post or whatever.

This research firm actually analyzed how things spread on social media and Twitter, and it's very influencer based. A few big influencers will tweet something or share something and then like their whole audience will see it. Then every single layer down the pyramid further fewer and fewer and fewer people see it.

So, actually what you really want to do is get as many influencers to see whatever it is that you're doing, or in your case, you know, class president, most popular kid at school, leader of the student group. Then they'll disseminate it to people who will progressively share it with fewer and fewer people. It doesn't matter because the influencers just know so many people.

Austin Rief: 10m 43s

You know who this reminds me of? If he's not doing it anymore, I assume it's because he now works at a 16 Z, but Sriram. He used to work at Twitter. He started this interview series, the observer knowledge, observer, observer effect, something like that.

I can't remember the name and he had some great guests. Don't get me wrong. They were great interviews. But you’d think from the response of Twitter that this guy was doing rockets. He was revealing something the world had never seen. He shut down Twitter. I’d read it. I'd be like, yeah, it's really interesting, but it's just an interview.

I'm not insulting at all. It was a great interview. But then you realize like, oh wait, Mark Andreesen, shit. The first one is Mark Andreesen. He’s sharing it and you get all these people, I think the VC industry is a little herd mentality. Like you're saying, it's influencer- driven.

Oh, this person with 200,000 followers tweeted it. Oh, well, I'll look like a thought leader if I can tweet it for my friends, do it. I just laugh because I'm like, yeah, they're great interviews, but they're just interviews. People were acting like it was curing cancer.

Courtland Allen: 11m 46s

I'm looking at this site right now, The Observer Effect. He's actually doing a ton of interviews on Clubhouse now. I think he has the biggest show on Clubhouse called The Good Time Club or something.

But he only interviewed three people for The Observer Effect: Mark Andreessen, Daniel the CEO of Spotify and then Toby the CEO of Shopify. These are all humongous names, but exactly what you said happened. Everybody just said like, oh, there's a cool interview with this person, somehow got other influencers to share. That's the news of the day. That's the cool thing to do to talk about how amazing this interview is.

I had kind of a similar thing happen to me on Twitter the other day, where I tweeted my second most popular tweet of all time. I got like 1,500 likes. It was because Nat Eliason had this tweet where he said, I know a lot of smart people and not a single one of them wants their kids to go to college.

Then everybody was talking about it. The tweet got like 4,000 likes, tons of famous people were just re-tweeting it and sharing it. Then I just quote tweeted it and was like, actually I had a great time in college. Here's the four benefits that I got and it took me like five seconds write my tweet. I just sent it out.

It got a ton of steam, not because it was some brilliant, genius tweet, but because everybody was just talking about that day. All of the sort of major influencers on Twitter wanted to weigh in with their opinion and that just sort of carried the wave. I guess it's something that applies to pretty much any business. If you could just figure out what everybody's talking about and who are the biggest names talking about it, get on their radar, you're going to grow and you're gonna spread.

Austin Rief: 13m 2s

I'm sure you saw yesterday or maybe you didn't, but the CEO who talked about her EA. This tweet went viral because this woman wrote a tweet storm. I didn't even read it. You know, I just saw all the people making fun of it. She wrote a tweetstorm and I'm so efficient. I can do all these things. I can take David Perrel’s course…

I can do this. I can do this all because my EA is amazing and lists what her EA does. It's like, that's basically what a CEO does, or it's not the job of an EA and everyone mocked it and ever was ever was piling on and going viral. That was bringing awareness to the initial tweet.

Courtland Allen: 13m 36s

I'm looking at one of the mocking tweaks right now. It’s got 4,000 likes and says the most undervalued asset of a CEO is an executive assistant. My EA writes software, hires employees, raises VC, completes financial projections, and submits reports to regulatory agencies. And it's like 70 quotes, 250 likes, they don't even link to the original tweet, but you know they’re subtweeting somebody, and if your subtweet we can get 4,000 likes, then the original tweet must've blown up.

Austin Rief: 13m 59s

Something interesting happens on Twitter when something, could be good or bad, it doesn't really matter, but once it gets to a certain point, people hate it. No matter how good a tweet is.

Someone can give really good advice on Twitter. Like, yeah, it can be platitudes or wherever, really good advice and people love it. You can actually go back in the quote, tweet history of the replies history and see people are like, this is awesome.

But then it gets a thousand likes and then there's some hatred cause it gets outside that bubble. Then it gets a 10, 20,000 likes and we were like, oh, like this tweet isn't even that good. And it's like, yeah, but the original tweeter wasn't like, oh, I'm going to tweet something that good only up to 10,000 likes. Then it's not quite a thousand likes good.

It happens with the [inaudible] all the time. The [inaudible] will be fine. It's crazy. It's got 40,000 likes. It's not his fault he got 40,000 likes. He just posted some contents, you know?

Courtland Allen: 14m 53s

Yeah, it's just envy. Everybody will be happy for their friend if their friend gets a good job or gets a promotion. But if your friend wins the lottery, then suddenly people start feeling a little bit different. Like, hey, you know, this guy is not that cool. Why don't I have all these millions of dollars, et cetera.

I've seen people talk about tweets in the exact same way. Greg Eisenberg, a mutual friend of ours had this giant tweetstorm. I don't know exactly how many likes it got, but it was mega. It was like 50,000 likes or something crazy. He's like, I talked to five billionaires last week, here's what I learned.

It was a pretty interesting tweet thread. It wasn't mind-blowingly amazing, but it was fine. Like you said, for whatever reason, it just took off, it resonated. Then the second it gets past a certain point everybody stopped saying, hey, was this a good tweet thread? And they started saying, hey, does this thread deserve to get all this traffic? And how dare he be so successful with this thing that I could have tweeted, but I didn't think of.

It's funny to watch it happen. It's part of the reason why I don't care that much about Twitter. You and I are part of this 100K iMessage group where it's five or six people who are trying to get to a 100 thousand followers on Twitter.

I checked it this morning. I was like, oh, Austin's coming on the show, let me see what's going on in 100K club. I realized I was kicked out two weeks ago for never participating and never commenting or saying anything, which is completely fair.

I probably was the person in the group who cared the least. I just didn't do anything to get to 100K. You might be one level above me. You were pretty close. You're like 70,000 Twitter followers.

I love the way you use Twitter. I love the fact that you have this thread of threads pinned to the top of your profile, where before this episode, I can go and see what is Austin thinking about Morning Brew and you've tweeted every insight that you've learned from Morning Brew and a bunch of different threads, and it's super valuable and useful for anybody who wants to go learn how you did it.

Austin Rief: 16m 29s

I can't stand when people critique other people's Twitters. With that being said, I tweet when I have something to say, I don't tweet for the sake of tweeting. So, you'll see in that thread earlier this year, I had a bunch of things I wanted to say, and I sat down. I said them all.

I haven't really tweetstormed in, I mean, maybe there's like one in the last two or three months, and that's why my growth has gone down so much. I grew 25,000 January. I grew like, I don't even know three or 4,000 in the last month. Just cause I haven't tweeted that much recent or at least I haven't tweeted things that get followers.

Courtland Allen: 16m 58s

The thing about Twitter is it's this weird unholy combination of people just shooting the shit and just saying personal stuff, talking to their friends, saying talk about what they ate for breakfast and other people who are hardcore marketers, trying to grow.

Usually you don't see those two things in the same place. If you go to Amazon and you look at books, there is no one who's casually communicating by writing a book. You only do that if you're really trying to reach an audience. Same with newsletters. The vast majority of newsletters are people actually trying really hard to grow their newsletters.

But Twitter, I think people who are using it for personal reasons might feel it's super unnatural to see someone else who's like, you know, going out and researching stories and tweaking every single word of their tweet and make it copywriting perfection and grow really big.

I agree with you. There's really no wrong way to use Twitter. Just let everybody do the thing they want to do. You know what it is? It's good envy practice. If you find yourself getting really pissed off at people on Twitter for tweeting things that are doing really well it's a good opportunity to check in with yourself and ask, am I envious? And how do I overcome this feeling right now?

It’s kinda cool, because there's not that many opportunities in life to do that, but with Twitter, you can do it every single day. Cause there's always dumb threads that are getting thousands of retweets. You can just check in with yourself. So maybe I'll start using Twitter for that.

Your tweets are super helpful and I want to go through some of them cause they tell Morning Brew's story pretty well. One of the, I think stories from the early days is you had, what was it called? Your Brewbassador Program. Great name. You talked about how this actually was one of the things that helped you grow the most.

I'm actually seeing other employees at Morning Brew write about this in other places. It was clearly a big part of your business. I think someone said referrals are responsible for something like 30% of your subscribers, which is crazy. What's the brew Brewbassador program? How did it work? What's the story there?

Austin Rief: 18m 34s

I told you before that Alex and I were going to clubs and classes to find these central nodes at business schools and getting people signed up for Morning Brew. We then thought, okay, what if we can get our friends to do this at other schools, too? Add more readers to other schools and build this out.

That was the OG Morning Brew ambassador program. Then we thought to ourselves, and we weren't the first people to ever do this, we thought, okay, what if we can turn everyone into an ambassador? We can build out the referral program and the referral program is what gets all that traffic.

When it comes down to a referral program, there's a few components. First is letting people know there is a referral program. Two, making sure it's as easy as possible to share. Three, aligning incentives with your power users or people who you want to share or think will share. You don't want to create rewards for your median user. You want to create rewards for your top decile user.

Courtland Allen: 19m 26s

Why is that? Because they're going to be the people who do other referrals anyway?

Austin Rief: 19m 30s

The way I think about it is there are certain people who critique pricing of online classes, or online core-based school classes or courses or whatever. They're like, I can't believe they charge a thousand dollars. I would never charge a dollar for an online. I would never pay a dollar for an online course.

Tt's like, yeah, but if you wouldn't pay it all for an online course, you're not in the total addressable market. So, no one really cares about you. No one's pricing based off of you. They're not pricing for the median.

They're not saying, oh, well there are 500 people who pay a thousand dollars and five and people pay zero. Therefore, let me charge 500. Same thing with the referral program. There are a ton of people who would never refer. I'm not trying to encourage you to refer if you would never refer.

I’m instead taking the people who love Morning Brew one to represent at one end, wanna a show people they read Morning Brew and then giving them more of what they love. So, more content, more swag, whatever. That's the key thing about referral programs.

Courtland Allen: 20m 23s

Yeah. You've got a few of those. I was scrolling on your Twitter. You’ve got one, Sarah Rutledge, Sarah_rutledge1 who tweeted just this morning. Why yes, I am the girl who got the Morning Brew logo tattooed on her leg. And she's got a beautiful picture of her leg and some sort of Japanese kimono and a picture of the Morning Brew coffee cup.

So, you've got a lot of people who are your rabid ambassadors who want to share with you. How do you find these people? How do you get people to be so obsessive about a newsletter that they want to get the Morning Brew logo tattooed on their leg and then brag about it on Twitter?

Austin Rief: 20m 53s

There's a few things. First, when we started off again, we weren't trying to build a rabid fan base if we were, I don't think we would have, but because we weren't trying, we were just being authentic.

It's just about authenticity. It compounds over time. Authentic compounds over time. It's impossibly authentic day one. You can't do something one day and like this is truly authentic. It takes time. That's the first thing.

The second thing, and this is why I think referrals are so successful for us, is at first we used to kind of try to hide the referral program and try to be like, sneaky about it and make jokes. One day we woke up, and it wasn't this simple, right. It took time, but basically one day woke up and we're like, we're giving away free content. We shouldn't feel bad if we're asking our users to just share it.

It's almost become like a meme, where I'll be with people and like, oh, this is the Morning Brew guy and the other, person's like, oh, I've never heard of Morning Brew. They'll tell them what Morning Brew is. And they'll be like, oh, but use my referral code, and so it's built this subfranchise where people think about that.

It's fun. It's gamified. We do put in people's faces. Again, we probably turn off a few percent of people, but if you get pissed off because we asked you to share a free newsletter, you're probably not gonna be the person who reads the newsletter every day. That’s just not you.

Courtland Allen: 22m 7s

What's the incentive that these power users actually want? If I share, I'm a Morning Brew power subscriber, I'm sharing it with everyone I know. I'm referring, you know, a hundred people a week. What am I getting in return?

Austin Rief: 22m 18s

We actually just changed it. I'll tell you what it was historically and now what it is. Historically, it was the first referral you got for sharing three times was more Morning Brew content, an exclusive Sunday edition.

If you like Morning Brew, you'd probably really like Morning Brew. If you like it enough to share it, you probably really like it enough to share it. Therefore, we're going to give you more content.

Now, we've 3 million readers. It's time to open up the Sunday edition to everyone. Make it unique, make it, we're now calling it the Sunday Edition. It's a little more glossy. It's like New York Mag, Atlantic-esque, our version of a magazine in the newsletter.

So, now we picked our second, most engaged with thing, and it's our trivia. Now you get a trivia game and people love our trivia. We send you a little bit of trivia and we'll see how that goes. We're going to iterate and find things that work.

Courtland Allen: 23m 4s

Yeah. I love that. It's like, it's very exclusive. Anyone can get money, you know, it's very exclusive and aligned to what it is that you're doing, what people like.

Who doesn't want to get in on some secret edition of a thing they already love? If you're going to a college, who doesn't want to be part of a secret group at that college? If you're subscribed to a newsletter or you're part of a forum, who doesn't want to be...

I remember when I was a kid, I had a World of Warcraft Guild when I was a teenager that I ran with my brother. You get 200 people un a Guild. You need some sort of hierarchy for who tells other people what to do, who organizes things, et cetera. It was really hard splitting things up because you would have people who are super competent and you're like, this person is, they know what they're doing. They’re very responsible, they should for sure be promoted.

Then you end up people who were super loyal, but they weren't necessarily the most competent. This guy has been with us every night for two years, but he honestly couldn't lead a fish to water. He probably should not be in charge of anything.

How do you reward these people? We ended up making kind of an exclusive group of people called the core members and we gave them their own unique forum. They got to feel as special as all the other people who were in charge of stuff. Literally it was nothing other than they just get to have a private place to talk to each other. That for some reason is extremely valuable to almost everybody.

Austin Rief: 24m 12s

Yeah, I think that's what people miss about referral programs. Robinhood’s is great. Why is it great because they give you a share or a fraction of share of a share and it just fits so well with the product messaging.

If Robinhood gave you the same amount and just dealt US dollars, like here's $5, I think PayPal would do that. Or does that still? The messaging is not perfect, but the messaging is perfect with sign up a Robinhood and get a stock, refer, get a stock. It keeps you in that mindset. If you're going to refer your friends to Robinhood, you probably really like investing in stocks.

Courtland Allen: 24m 47s

Do you feel like you as an individual need to have a big audience and if so, why? Just for being an investor or other reasons?

Austin Rief: 24m 57s

I think it's important for a few reasons. Number one, I didn't start off intentionally growing my Twitter audience. I just wanted to tweet more and be active on Twitter. For me, it's been like a little bit of a, it was like it snowballed.

I started off beginning of 2019 and I tweeted some stuff and someone really awesome who I idolized, looked up to him, I admire, DMed me. He was like, hey, I'd love to chat. I was like, he wants to chat with me?

That's not how, that's not how it should work. That kept on happening. It was really, really cool on the way up. I've made these relationships and met these people, you, for example, I've met all these awesome people I otherwise, I wouldn't, I would probably wouldn’t know what Indie Hackers, if not for Twitter, that's where I learn about so much stuff. It's really cool. I think it keeps on growing.

Now, part of me is wanting to grow my following. There is definitely some vanity some, I was like, why not? Like, yeah. 60,000 is cool, a 100,000’s cool, or a quarter of million’s cooler, but recently, and I think this is why I've stopped tweeting is, and then this is probably not a good personality trait, but there are some negative side effects when you get over 50, 60, 70,000 followers, which is the people who start to follow you, not only do you not know them anymore, but you probably don't even know people who know people who know them.

People start to view you as a public figure, not as a person. It's not saying that I get insulted by the responses cause I don't, but it's like, I don't want to deal with this. There's just so much criticism. I just don't need to deal with it.

I've gotten a lot of what I want to get out of it. I was thinking about it today, I should get back to tweeting more. I do love, the thing I like about Twitter most is I learned so much from other people. I love for someone to learn anything from me, but you get to a point it's like, I just don't want to deal with all this negativity.

Courtland Allen: 26m 47s

There's something about large numbers where you got 70,000 followers on Twitter. What is one in 70,000 people capable of? There's probably at least one or two murderers in there. There’s probably, a couple thousand extremely negative Nancies who are always going to shit on whatever you have to say.

It just gets stressful. When you have a much smaller number of people, you just have sort of quality control. Those are the people that, the people who authentically like you. So, I'm right there with you.

I was talking to Austin Arvin about this the other day, actually. He has a huge Twitter account. I think he's at 150,000 followers or something like that. He was talking about how during the pandemic, he said something that wasn't related to the pandemic and people were like, how dare you talk about something that's not this.

I just can't imagine being someone who's trying to police what someone else is saying on Twitter to force him to talk about a particular, you can just unfollow them, right? You don't have to manually voluntarily follow this person. That's only a thing that happens once you're beyond a certain size. Below that no one really cares.

I don't know. It's interesting to hear your perspective because you have these two audiences on Twitter and through your company. I think most people I talk to only have one. Either their company's big and they don't care, or their Twitter profile is big and they are working on that and not focusing on their company.

Austin Rief: 27m 56s

I mean, we're, it's unique, right? Because we are a content company and my belief at Morning Brew is that anyone who wants to be a content creator can. It doesn't mean anyone's going to be monetized.

But everyone adds value. A lot of our employees create great content. Our salespeople create great B2B newsletters to send to our clients. One of our software engineers just wrote up a tweetstorm this is what I've learned the last six months. That's awesome. I love that. That's awesome.

That does come with some liability. It comes with people are going to make mistakes. We've made mistakes. We've done some bad things. Not intentionally, right, but we've tweeted some things where in hindsight we're like, yeah, that probably wasn't a great tweet, but you can't get the, to some extent you can have the good without the bad, right?

If you're going to be empowering your employee’s tweet and you can't monitor every single character that comes off their keyboard. Once in a while, something's gonna happen where it's a conversation or it's a very tough thing to police your employees’ Twitters.

Courtland Allen: 28m 52s

Well, it's pretty cool to have employees who actually care enough to want to tweet about what's going on. Cause, and there's this whole build in public craze, right? If you want people to care about what's going on in your company, you should be transparent and talk about what you're doing. For example, you've got, I don't know if he's still there, but his name is Toby on Twitter.

Austin Rief: 29m 8s

Yes, Toby, he runs our Twitter thread. He's amazing. Yeah.

Courtland Allen: 29m 12s

Yeah. Well, he's like, here's a quick money thread and this was from his personal account, on how the Morning Brew picks our subject lines for each email. I remember reading this tweet and be like, oh, this is super useful. I should do this for Indie Hackers.

Every morning when you're gonna send out an email, you actually come up with four different subject lines and you send each of those to 80,000 readers. He says each batch gets a different subject line and whichever one has the highest open rate will go out to the remaining, 2 million readers, which is super cool.

He talks about how do you pick the subject line? And he's like, well, it's not even that scientific. We just sort of skimmed the newsletter for interesting and eye-catching phrases from the stories. Then the writers pick one for the day and we roll with whatever they choose.

It's just cool seeing him explain this on his Twitter thread and knowing this isn't even, this is just someone who's working at Morning Brew. There's other Twitter threads that I've found from other Morning Brew employees where I'm thinking, okay, well, how do I at Indie Hackers also hire employees who are not only going to build and create stuff, but also share and build in public. Cause that's not a very common trait for the average employee.

Austin Rief: 30m 5s

Especially in a media company. Some of these legacy companies, the Substack thing. You have people starting Substacks and now New York Times was like no one can create a Substack. That's okay. The New York Times can get away with that. They have the brands, they have the prestige, they're going to be fine. They're the New York Times.

But what's going to happen is a lot of these other businesses who aren't gonna be fine are going to replicate that. I think it's, you have a bunch of content creators. We have to empower people to have a voice and tell their story on the internet.

I think it's a rising tide that lifts all boats. I try to be an example of what people can do, and there are people who hate it and don't do it. I'm totally fine with that. There are people who love it and do it every day, and that's also cool.

Courtland Allen: 30m 50s

Another interesting thing that you've mentioned a couple of times about the Morning Brew is that you basically retain your readers. Even in college, when you first started this, your subscriber base was growing and people weren't unsubscribing. I think a lot of people who are starting companies for the first time don't understand how important it is to be able to retain your users. It's just as important as finding the next user.

I'm curious what your sort of model is for why people who read Morning Brew are more retained than people who might read, I don't know, the next newsletter over, or maybe someone's random subset newsletter. What are you guys doing right that gets people to stay retained? I have my own theory and I want to hear what your opinion is on it.

Austin Rief: 31m 26s

We built a daily habit. There's a lot of downsides to daily news or to writing daily, but the pro is, it's a habit. People have a habit. They wake up every morning. They read Morning Brew. Most people do at the same time every day, whether it's right when they get out of bed, they get to work, but we built a daily habit and habits are hard to break once you build them.

It's habitual, right? We're consistent. We never missed a day. We show up every single day in your inbox. The content is really, really good. It's something that I don't talk about enough because it's such a given, but it's so important to talk about. The content’s unbelievable. If the content was bad, people wouldn't come back. It's just that simple.

Courtland Allen: 32m 4s

Right, because let's say you have 1% churn. Every time you send an email, 1% of subscribers are unsubscribed. Well, if you have 3 million subscribers, and you're sending every single day, you're going to be down to like 2 million people by the end of the month. If you have 1 million, 1% churn, which is crazy, you're gonna lose a third of your subscriber base.

Versus if you only send, you know, a few times a month, then you're going to be down to something 2.9 million, right? It's way different. So, the more emails you're sending, the more important it is for you to basically have extremely low churn.

I think what's cool about news is exactly what you said. It's this habit. People already basically want to know what's going on every single day, whether the Morning Brew exists or not, they're going to talk to their friends. They're going to scroll Twitter. They're going to go to the New York times. They're going to find out some way to figure out what's going on.

I think that churn is kind of a thing that happens once your product stops solving the problem that people have or once they stop having that problem. News is really cool because people just don't stop having a news problem.

With Indie Hackers, our newsletter we'll send out, we used to send out at the very beginning, just here's the five founders that we interviewed this week about how they grew their businesses. That was super cool. It helped people who needed to be inspired and help people who needed to get started but needing to be inspired and needed to get started aren't problems that people have for 50 years on end.

They have that problem for a few months and then they get their solution from you and then like, okay, cool, unsubscribe, I no longer need this. Even the happiest users would sort of graduate from the newsletter.

We sort of morphed our newsletter over time to be a lot more newsy, a lot more like, hey, we're going to keep you up to date with what's going on in the Indie Hackers community and the business world, and a lot less like here's some evergreen story that you really only need to read once and if you read it somewhere else, then probably don't need this newsletter anymore.

Austin Rief: 33m 46s

But there are downsides news. It's hard to monetize the news. It's also new content every day. We don't get a second chance at it. You can create an email drip about becoming an indie hacker and you can A/B test that email drip a hundred ways. We can't A/B test. Yeah, we can A/B test a subject line. Be we can’t A/B test will our audience like that first story? It's the news. We get one shot at it.

Courtland Allen: 34m 5s

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. One of your Twitter threads you talked about basically here's some things I've learned over time running the Morning Brew. It’s been what, like six years.

One of them said here are ten things I'd say I've learned over the last five years on startups, investing, marketing, and career advice. Your third piece of advice is something that's so funny because it's the exact opposite of what so many people say on the podcast.

I usually end the podcast and they say, you know, what's your one piece of advice for everybody and by far, the most common advice is just get started. Then by far the second most common piece of advice is just follow your passion and everything will work out from there.

Your tweet says, follow your passion is complete crap. People are passionate about things that they're good at. So, get really good at something and then you'll become passionate at it. Then you'll make enough money to follow your original passion in your free time. Does that describe how you've grown Morning Brew and other things that you've worked on?

Austin Rief: 34m 54s

I am passionate about media. I am passionate about building a company, but I wasn't, growing up It wasn't like, damn, I want to build a media business. I got pretty good. I think, or good enough, can always get better, but you know, good enough to be mildly successful building a media company. It feels much better to do something and be good at it.

I love basketball, but I'm a five, nine Jew. I was not going to make the NBA. I'd be pretty miserable trying to play professional basketball right now, even though it's my passion, because I wasn't good at it. There's counter examples, right?

There are plenty of people who do something they love, do something that doesn't make a lot of money, but they love it. That's totally fine. I think that's the minority of people. I think most people should do something that they're really good at. Get good at something and then you like it, right?

People run distress debt hedge funds. No one likes distress debt. One of my good friends is a middle market industrial’s private equity. There is no way he grew up that's the industry I want to be in, but he got good at it and so he starts to like it. Then you can do things in your spare time that maybe are more like your passions, your traditional-like hobbies. But I don't recommend people trying to do their hobbies, their profession, unless you have potential.

Courtland Allen: 36m 19s

You gotta check multiple boxes. I think everybody wants there to be one answer. Just follow your passion. It's like, okay, well that's one box, but what about being good at it? What about having a strategy? What about all these other boxes?

If you ignore them and you're just significantly less likely to succeed, and you're always going to be able to go out in the world and find two or three stories of someone who didn't do any of that and they succeeded. But if you look at the denominator of everybody who tried doing it that way, who tried only having a passion and nothing else, then it's way bigger than two or three stories. It's like two or three people made that work out of millions. It's a little misleading sometimes.

Austin Rief: 36m 50s

LeBron James followed this passion. I would assume you're not LeBron James. I would just, you know, you're a believer, that's fine, but I would just guess, you're not LeBron.

Courtland Allen: 37m 3s

Well, there's also something to be said I think for this thing you're saying about skill, which is there's this book “Drive” and the author talks about what are the three things that drive you to do well at work and they’re mastery, autonomy and purpose.

The first one was just mastery. People who love their jobs and people who are good at their jobs have mastered their job. There's something good about when I sit down to write code where I just feel competent when I'm writing code and I'm blazing and I'm like, I'm writing this so much faster than I could have five years ago, so much faster and better than most people could. It just feels really good.

Then having a purpose. For you, maybe you're keeping people informed in a much better way, but otherwise they wouldn't be informed because there is no newsletter that actually does it in a conversational way that they want to read.

Then there is autonomy, which is what every indie hacker and every founder wants, which is you don't have a boss telling you what to do and no one's breathing down your neck and you get to self-direct.

I think that you could validate whether or not that's true for you, but I have every one of those things and Indie Hackers and it makes my job super fun. It makes me better at my job.

Austin Rief: 37m 55s

If you master something or you're very good at something, I think you'll have the opportunity for autonomy. I can't remember what the other one was, but I think you'll give yourself optionality by being very good at something.

Courtland Allen: 38m 7s

Well anyway, Austin, we're about out of time. I'd love to have you on the show again, cause there's so many different things you tweeted about Morning Brew and I'm sure in another year or two, you're going to be, I don't know, 5 million, 6 million subscribers, going to the moon. Thank you a ton for coming on the show, talking about Twitter, humoring me with all sorts of interesting topics. Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to and what's going on with morning brew?

Austin Rief: 38m 28s

Yeah. So, you can go to, you can sign for Morning Brew atmorningbrew.com. You can find me on Twitter at Austin underscore Rief, R I E F.

Courtland Allen: 38m 36s

All right. Thanks again.