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Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years

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Re: Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years

#3
It's a little light and snarky for my taste, but if you see it as a thin slice of "what people are talking about" more so than "what happened," then it makes sense. If you read this every day it basically hands you clever hot takes on current events you can use to sound smart with your friends. Not hard to see the appeal.

Personally, for thin-sliced news that's more about "what happened," I prefer Axios :)

Re: Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years

#4

It's a little light and snarky for my taste, but if you see it as a thin slice of "what people are talking about" more so than "what happened," then it makes sense. If you read this every day it basically hands you clever hot takes on current events you can use to sound smart with your friends. Not hard to see the appeal. Personally, for thin-sliced news that's more about "what happened," I prefer Axios :)

that's actually spot on. I used the newsletter to impress my MBA friends a couple of times but felt like a fraud.

Re: Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years

#6

It's a little light and snarky for my taste, but if you see it as a thin slice of "what people are talking about" more so than "what happened," then it makes sense. If you read this every day it basically hands you clever hot takes on current events you can use to sound smart with your friends. Not hard to see the appeal. Personally, for thin-sliced news that's more about "what happened," I prefer Axios :)

I also really like Axios, always very informative

Re: Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years

#8
post #7
post #5

I need to figure out how to scale my newsletter to this point :)

The trick is to sell the ads yourself directly to marketers who want to reach your audience without networks or middlemen.

How does one find these marketers?

Re: Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years

#9
A video recently went viral of David Bowie in 1999 saying that the internet was going to be the future. We're at a similar place with newsletters - a frontier that is on the verge of exploding.

I run Thinking About Things [0], a simple newsletter that is a single link every other day to something interesting. The response has been astonishing - it's gotten thousands of subscribers in a single year with no marketing. It started as a way to send articles to family and friends and yet the simple act of triage and curation seems to be something that many find valuable.

It's impossible to underestimate the degree to which curation is becoming the differentiator in the digital economy; those who can be trusted to provide valuable content from the fire hose of all that's available on the internet will become the new information brokers.

[1] thinking-about-things.com

Re: Morning Brew went from college newsletter to $75M in 5 years

#10

A video recently went viral of David Bowie in 1999 saying that the internet was going to be the future. We're at a similar place with newsletters - a frontier that is on the verge of exploding. I run Thinking About Things [0], a simple newsletter that is a single link every other day to something interesting. The response has been astonishing - it's gotten thousands of subscribers in a single year with no marketing.…

> those who can be trusted to provide valuable content from the fire hose of all that's available on the internet will become the new information brokers

Isn’t this what journalism was supposed to do before they discovered money?

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