How Morning Brew got their first 10k users

Austin Rief, the co-founder of Morning Brew, wrote a Twitter thread recently on how they got their first 10k customers.

Austin joined Alex Lieberman in 2014 with the goal of transforming a PDF attachment with 250 readers into a media business. They had 0 money to spend on marketing, so they had to get creative. In Austin's words, "We had to (quote Paul Graham) do things that don't scale".

Since they were students at the University of Michigan at the time, they asked business professor around the University if they could deliver a 5 minute pitch to the students.

They thought it would be an easy win. Who didn't want to get smarter in 5 minutes? The issue was that they were allowed to use the first 5 minutes of the lecture. As we all know from college, that's the time when no one pays attention and some might even enter the room late.

No one paid attention to them and no one signed up for their newsletter.

They realised that if people were not ready to sign up themselves, then Austin and Alex had to do it for them. After the pitch, they handed out a piece of paper to every student and asked them to write down their e-mail.

This simple change skyrocketed their conversion rates from less than 10% to over 75%. After a few weeks, Morning Brew reached a thousand daily readers.

Up until now, they did the thing that didn't scale (ping Paul G.). Now they had to scale. So they created the 'Morning Brew Ambassador Program' where students from Universities around the United States could pitch their classes, pass around pieces of papers and send back to Austin and Alex a photo of the e-mails they collected.

They twisted and tweaked the pitch, incentives and other bits, but the ambassador program was the one thing that helped Morning Brew reach their first 10.000 subscribers.