My First Million

Austin Rief: Building Morning Brew, The Ultimate Guide to Building Newsletter Businesses, Side Hustle Ideas, & More

Dec 20, 2022

01:18:20

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Quick takeaways

Building a successful newsletter business involves organic growth strategies and content evolution.

Competition can drive innovation and audience expansion in the newsletter industry.

Post-acquisition wealth management should prioritize diversification and conservative financial strategies.

Deep dives

Growing Morning Brew from College to a Multi-Million Dollar Business

The founders of Morning Brew, Austin Rief and Alex Lieberman, started the company while in college at the University of Michigan. They initially targeted finance-oriented content, creating a newsletter initially named Market Corner. Their journey involved organic growth strategies, such as leveraging college audiences, evolving the newsletter's content to cater to broader interests, and later how they resisted the conventional path of venture capital investment due to their college status.

Three types of email newsletters that you could start

01:40

The main thing

01:23

Sam Parr on Investing After A Big Win

00:39

Is Open AI a Good Idea?

04:01

Introduction

2min

How Did Your Parents Think About You?

2min

I Wanted to Crush You Guys

2min

Why Does This Look So Much Better Than Ours?

2min

You Launched Multiple Newsletters, Which Route Do You Like Looking Back?

3min

What's Your Framework for Email Marketing?

2min

B2B Media Companies

5min

Dude, You're Not Cut Out for the Media Buying World.

2min

We're Going to Get a Million Dollars, Right?

2min

10.

How to Deploy a Billion Dollars of Marketing Spend?

2min

11.

You're So Good at Starting a Business

3min

12.

The Great Wall of Opens

3min

13.

How to Get Your First Million Email Subscribers

2min

14.

You Got Rich, Pretty Dark?

2min

15.

Get Into Any Room, Right?

2min

16.

Kid Rock's a New Source of Wealth

3min

17.

Founder of Beehive, Tyler Dank

2min

18.

What Do You Think the Business Will Sell For?

3min

19.

How to Save Companies Money or Earn Individuals Side Income

3min

20.

How to Scale a Startup to Seven Figures of AR?

2min

21.

AI for Morning Brew

2min

22.

The Lindy Effect

4min

23.

Rameet, What's Your Rich Life?

3min

24.

Do You Like Having 200+ Employees?

2min

25.

Is Your Style Not for Everyone?

2min

26.

You're Great, You Don't Want to Be Ajerk

2min

27.

How Much of a Talent Do You Have?

2min

28.

Is There a Difference Between Laughter and Character?

5min

29.

You Better Public Speaking

3min

Episode 398: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk to Morning Brew Founder & CEO Austin Rief (@austin_rief) about building, growing and selling a newsletter valued at $75M in 5 years, whether newsletter businesses are still worth doing, how to make them succeed, and a few good side hustle ideas to start now.

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Links:

* Morning Brew

* Toptal

* Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel.

* Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter.

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Show Notes:

(01:00) - Morning Brew origin story

(19:10) - Ad sales

(24:10) - Austin's strengths

(32:15) - Austin's upbringing

(42:55) - What did you do with your new found wealth?

(45:55) - Ideas brainstorm

(01:13:14) - Future plans

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Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.

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