040: Alex Lieberman - Building a 3M Subscriber Media Empire

Alex Lieberman is the co-founder and chairman of Morning Brew. Morning Brew is a media company bringing informative and digestible business news to your inbox every morning. They educate nearly 3,000,000 daily readers on the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.

Alex also hosts The Founder’s Journal Podcast where he gives listeners a “backstage pass” into building Morning Brew, and in turn, helps them build a better business or career.

Morning Brew is considered to be the largest email newsletter on the web. Business Insider recently acquired a major stake in Morning Brew at a rumored valuation of over 75 million dollars. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The foundations for building a great media brand
• What methods and metrics work best for rapid subscriber growth
• How to optimize a referral program to gain explosive growth
• How to be the leader your employees need as you scale

Links & Resources

• Business Insider
• Kara Goldin’s LinkedIn page
• Hint Water
• Pat Flynn
• Pat Flynn: Why I Switched from AWeber to Infusionsoft to ConvertKit
• KickoffLabs
• Viral Loops
• Robinhood
• Tim Ferriss
• Harry’s Razors
• Lenny Rachitsky
• Packy McCormick

Guest’s Links

• Alex’s LinkedIn page
• Morning Brew
• Founder’s Journal podcast
• Morning Brew Accelerator (MB/A)
• Alex’s Twitter: @businessbarista

Episode Transcript

Alex: [00:00:00]
That’s the beautiful thing about just business in general, this diversity of what brings people joy. People who love building process and planning who have a foundation and building on top of that foundation. You have people who have zero foundation. They want to prove to the world and prove to themselves that the crazy thing that’s been in their head that they think is valuable, there’s no proof of yet, that the actually people will love it.

Nathan: [00:00:30]
In today’s episode, I talked to Alex Lieberman, who is the co-founder, and now chairman—formerly CEO—and now chairman of Morning Brew. They grew the newsletter to over 3 million subscribers, which is insane. Making it the largest email newsletter on the web. So if we’re talking about newsletters on this podcast who better to talk to than Alex.

We get into why he transitioned from CEO to chairman. We talk about the exit: they sold a majority of the company to Business Insider rumored at over a $75 million valuation, which is really, really impressive. One of the things we talk about the channels that drove growth, their affiliate program, the referral program that so many people talk about and reference, what works, what doesn’t.

We get his take on sponsorships versus paid content, details on the type of ads that they used in their paid acquisition when they were growing Morning Brew, so much.

Anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff. I’ll get out of the way. Let’s dive in.

Alex, thanks for joining me.

Alex: [00:01:32]
Thanks so much for having me, pumped to do this.

Nathan: [00:01:34]
All right. So I want to start with, your role has shifted. You just moved from CEO of Morning Brew to chairman. And tell me a little bit about that.

What, what instigated it. What made it time for that move? I know a lot of people who have run companies for years consider a move like that.

Alex: [00:01:52]
There’s many months in the making. and I think in a lot of ways, the last year has kind of been like a unspoken transition, based on just the things that I was spending my time on and the things my co-founder Austin was spending his time on. You know, I think the, the way that I think about it is I loved—I’ve loved every part of Morning Brew, but like the things that have really given me energy is when I am building things from scratch, I love building things from scratch.

And that’s what I was able to do in, in the early days of the Brew, you know, our original newsletter, our B2B newsletters, our podcasts, like really creating the foundation for something that could obviously become a large media brand. As we’ve scaled, obviously like, you know, you’ve, I’m sure experienced this in your role, the roles of a CEO change 50 different times.

And so the way, you know, the way I think about it is the first role that I had at Morning Brew was every role Austin. And I had every role. I always tended to lean more towards sales, marketing, and content, like more the creative and people facing side of the business. Austin always, spend more time on growth product, and like the finance, the finances of the business.

And so I wore many different hats and I loved doing those things. And then as we started to grow, as we got the flywheel going of creating great newsletter content, attracting audience and monetizing our audience through advertising. My role shifted. And I went from a hundred percent doing to what I would say is like 50% doing, and 50% managing.

And I really enjoyed managing, like I loved, I loved coaching people, supporting people, but what I also learned pretty early on in Morning Brew is that managing there, there were aspects of managing that I loved, and there are many aspects of managing that I didn’t love. The way I think about managing is I think there’s two aspects to managing there’s call it like leadership and there’s operational management, operational management, really being about.

Like goal setting, metric checking, and making sure that you’re holding someone accountable to continuing to do the job they’re supposed to do really important job for a manager. Then on the flip side, I would say the leadership side of managing is kind of the empathetic management part, which is how do you support someone in their career growth?

How do you talk to someone about the things that are impacting them in their job performance, whether it’s things within their career or things in their personal life that are coming into their career, because that inevitably obviously happens as well. And what I realized is I really loved the second thing.

I didn’t necessarily really loved the first thing. The reason I bring that up is because as we’ve scaled as Morning Brew, let’s say got to 50 people and. And at 50 people, we really, that was the point in time when we had to go from bein...