55
12 Comments

Two growth insights from the founder of Morning Brew

Morning Brew is a very impressive newsletter business:

  • 3 million subscribers total across 5 newsletters (4 business, 1 lifestyle)
  • 2.5 million subscribers on their biggest newsletter
  • made over $20 million in revenue in 2020
  • $6 million of that is profit
  • 2 founders and about 60 employees

Austin, one of the co-founders, is one of my favorite follows on Twitter, because he likes to share numbers and learnings. (Lots of people with newsletters like to share numbers, actually.)

Same, Meet Same 👯‍♀️

Yesterday, Austin had a really good thread about two insights that helped them grow 10x in a single year.

Here's the first:

The first insight was that the best way to grow a specific medium was to get promoted on that medium.

We found that readers we acquired from ads in other newsletters were >2x as engaged as readers we got from Facebook or referrals.

If you're building an X, find users from other X's. Simple.

Lots of people I've had on the Indie Hackers podcast have noticed this. For example, while running his growth agency, @Julian learned the secret to doing well on Kickstarter is to advertise to an audience of people who've bought on Kickstarter before.

This is also why you often see similar restaurants near each other. Would you rather build your coffee shop across the street from another coffee shop, or across the street from a clothing store? It's unintuitive, but I'd pick coffee shop, because I want to reach people who obviously love coffee.

I'm early! Now what? 🐥

There's also a hidden insight in Austin's followup tweets:

On top of the quality, in 2018 the newsletter monetization market was nascent.

When we began to exhaust the newsletters we sponsored, we needed to figure out a way to find more.

We helped these businesses build out their ad department.

Just because you're early to a market doesn't mean you win. We can all name a handful of first movers who got crushed by the competition.

You need a playbook for how to take advantage of being early. Austin's was:

  1. Recognize you're early, otherwise you won't take action. This is surprisingly hard to do. We can see the past but not the future, so we often assume we're late because "look at all the companies already doing this!" But you know you're early when there aren't a ton of people selling you books about how they made it big doing what you're trying to do. I'm only half joking. 😝
  2. Dive into competitive marketing channels. Usually this would be horrible advice. But being early means less competition means competitive channels are as good as they'll get. Think advertising, SEO, app stores — anything where there's limited real estate people are competing for.
  3. Create the channels you want to see in the world. That looks like reaching out and educating people with big audiences. For example, the first to do influencer marketing had to pitch influencers on this new idea they'd never heard of.

I occasionally send out this newsletter with my thoughts on indie hacking. Subscribe to get new posts in your inbox. Courtland


Notes on Moats 🏝

There's a fourth item I'd add to the "be early" playbook, which is to build moats.

You will have copycats. Moats make it easy to ignore them.

  • For indie hackers, the easiest moat is often network effects. Make it so every additional customer improves the quality of your product for other customers. Communities are a simple way to do this.
  • Branding can be a solid moat, too. It means capturing mindshare through a stellar reputation. Mindshare is hard to unseat. One thing you can do when you're early is to coin, popularize, and own new terms. (e.g. me and "indie hackers," Li Jin and "passion economy," etc.) It's also important to be unique if you're going for branding as a moat. Avoid building on platforms that commoditize you. There's no point in building a brand that's not memorable, and you can't be memorable if others are indistinguishable.

Most other moats are a waste of time for indie hackers. You aren't Google. You're not going to build tech nobody else can replicate. The best you can do is move fast and be good. That discourages most intelligent would-be copycats, and the unintelligent ones aren't worth worrying about.

Read the news. Seriously. 🗞

I'm big on news. You should be, too.

It's called the news because it's the best place to find out what's new. Finding out what's new is how you uncover opportunities. And proactively uncovering opportunities is how you make your own luck. Waiting around for opportunities to fall into your lap is how you stay unlucky.

For example, here's one instance of luck:

Next, we had heard that Instagram was ramping up Instagram story ads.

I doubt Austin just happened to hear about the release of Instagram ads. No, he was on the look out. He was constantly experimenting. It would be more accurate to say that nobody could've stopped him from learning about Instagram ads. It was inevitable. Morning Brew was on a mission.

I've met lots of people like this. When I first launched Indie Hackers, some intrepid founders pitched me to advertise their product on my brand new website. I think they paid me $800.

I'll be honest: I don't know what happened to them. Their ads kind of flopped. My bad. But such is the nature of experimentation: you win some, you lose some. Here's what it looks like when you win:

Performance was insane. We couldn't spend money fast enough.

We were getting subscribers for 10 cents each.

You don't have to be crazy insightful to do what Morning Brew did here. You just have to keep your ear to the ground.


Thanks for reading!

I occasionally send out this newsletter with my thoughts on indie hacking. Subscribe to get new posts in your inbox.

  1. 4

    Great post, but I have one question.How can I stay up to date with the news as a indie hacker.What newsletters, websites, twitter accounts do you recommend for staying up to date as an indie hacker?beside indiehackers website and newsletter, :)

    1. 2

      Depends on what you're doing! Or more specifically, what customers you're serving and what channels you're using to reach them. You've probably got some niche sources that are worth 10x more to you than generalist sources of news.

      (If you haven't started anything yet, disregard all this advice and start something, anything. Spotting opportunities won't help you if you don't have anything you can apply them to.)

      My goals are largely media-based nowadays, so I consume a ton of stuff. I wouldn't necessarily copy my approach if I were you, and there are too many channels for me to list in a comment anyway. But broadly I look at a combination of Twitter accounts, newsletters, podcasts, communities, blogs, and news media sites. Sometimes I'll proactively search Google News for specific information on a topic. And I also try to have conversations with people frequently, which lead to all sorts of new discoveries.

    2. 2

      Shameless plug: I run a weekly series on IndieHackers called "Acquisition channel opportunities" (see this). Also, the "Top News" section on Indie Hackers is getting better and better.

      1. 2

        Just wanted to say that I am really enjoying your "Acquisition channel opportunities" series.

        1. 1

          Really glad you like the series, Jack.

  2. 2

    Thanks for sharing, It’s a totally different league to my newsletter but it’s inspirational.

    Your notes about being early to the party are really interesting. I was super early into the podcasting scene as a listener in 2003/2004. At the time it wasn’t a great industry to learn about technology, there was no money or infrastructure.

    But now the scene has really started taking off, especially the past couple of years. It’s been great to watch. There are a lot of cool companies and money seems to be flowing in that direction.

    Timing is everything, and it’s very tricky when you are an early adopter, so your moat tips are super useful, and generally a good mental model, because it’s difficult sometimes to see the woods for the trees.

  3. 1

    superb post, thank you for sharing

  4. 1

    Thanks for sharing Courtland. Very precise and insightful. As a new founder, I need some advice to how to think about "funding acquistion". At what stage would start putting in your savings into acquisition or are there other ways to think about how to go about investing in acquisition at very early stage?

  5. 1

    Very insightful! Thank you!

  6. 1

    Good stuff Courtland. Thanks for sharing this!

  7. 1

    It's like deja vu reading the moats section Courtland :P

    1. 1

      How so? Because they apply to IH itself?

Trending on Indie Hackers
Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 19 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments