Morning Brew’s Marketing Strategy: From Dorm Room to $70M+
$5.8M
Revenue/mo
Business Type
Content/Media
Monetization
Advertising
Founded
2015
How It Started
Two college students sat in a dorm room at the University of Michigan in 2014, frustrated.
Their friends—smart, ambitious business students—were supposed to stay on top of the business world. But they weren't. Why? Because reading the Wall Street Journal felt like work.
Business news was dense. Boring. Filled with jargon that made your brain hurt. So Alex Lieberman, a senior at Michigan, did what any frustrated person does: he started fixing the problem for himself.
Founders of Morning Brew: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief
He created a simple PDF newsletter called "Market Corner." He summarized the day's business news in plain English, added some personality, and emailed it to a few friends. Nothing fancy. No business plan. No funding. Just a guy trying to solve a real problem.
Within a few months, 300 people were reading it.
Then Austin Rief —a fellow student who got an email from Lieberman—saw the potential. He didn't just consume the newsletter. He reached out with feedback. Ideas. A vision of what this could become. Lieberman was impressed. He asked Austin to join him. And just like that, a side project became a partnership.
From 300 Readers to 100K
Here's the thing about Morning Brew's early growth: it wasn't sexy. It wasn't growth hacking. It was harder work.
Austin and Alex literally walked into business classes at the University of Michigan. They stood in front of students. They pitched their newsletter in person. And when they asked for email signups, something magic happened: 75% of people who were asked in person signed up. (Compare that to online: only 10% conversion.)
So they kept doing it. They trained other students—"Brew-bassadors"—to do the same thing at other universities. One ambassador collects emails at Duke. Another at Stanford. Another at Yale. They walked the newsletter across America, one classroom at a time.
By 2017, Morning Brew had hit 100,000 subscribers. They were growing, but still grinding. Lieberman had briefly worked at Morgan Stanley as a trader after graduation. But the newsletter kept pulling at him. By 2016, he quit trading to focus on it full-time. The business still wasn't making money, though. They had writers, but they paid them in exposure, not cash. The whole operation ran on a shoestring. But the content was good. People kept reading. People kept sharing.
The Real Growth Engine
In 2017, Austin and Alex launched something that would change everything: a referral program called "Share the Brew."
Here's how it worked: Read Morning Brew? Get a unique link. Share it with your friend. When your friend signs up, you earn points. Get enough points, and you unlock rewards: coffee mugs, stickers, exclusive content, access to a premium Sunday edition called "Light Roast."
Sounds simple, right? But it was genius because of one thing: the content was already worth sharing. People loved the newsletter so much they were already forwarding it to colleagues and friends. The referral program just turned that natural behavior into a system.
The numbers got wild. In the referral program's early days, it drove 80% of their growth. Some days, they'd see 1,000+ referrals in a single day. By 2019, 225,000 subscribers had shared at least one referral. Another 80,000 people had shared three or more. And the program had teeth. Because they required a double opt-in (the referred person had to confirm they wanted the email), the conversion rate stayed above 85%. Real subscribers, not just spam numbers.
The payoff? Morning Brew went from 100,000 subscribers in 2017 to millions within five years. The referral program consistently drove 30% of their growth (and up to 80% in those early days).
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