My First Million · Episode Brief
The Step-by-Step Playbook We Used to Build a $100M+ Newsletter Business
The Morning Brew founders' playbook for scaling a newsletter is mostly about one thing: hiring people smarter than you before you need them.
Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief built Morning Brew from a college side project into a $75M acquisition by Business Insider in 2021, and this conversation with Sam is a rigorous post-mortem on what actually drove the growth at each stage. The episode is one of the more operationally specific MFM conversations — not because Sam pushed them into it, but because Lieberman and Rief arrived with the kind of organized retrospective thinking that suggests they've told this story many times and know exactly which lessons survived contact with evidence.
The 0-to-100K subscriber segment reveals the least romantic version of newsletter growth: it happened primarily through campus ambassador programs, direct outreach, and relentless referral optimization, not through viral content. The content was excellent, but that's table stakes. The growth happened because they treated the distribution problem as an engineering problem — measurable, iterable, and testable — not a creative one.
The 'nontraditional hires' section is where the episode gets most immediately useful for anyone building a media business. Lieberman and Rief made a habit of hiring for intellectual curiosity and writing ability over domain credentials, often pulling from journalism backgrounds they'd previously ignored. The insight: media businesses fail when they hire people who think of themselves as operators rather than as storytellers. The editorial team's job is to develop the kind of judgment that produces good content consistently, and that judgment doesn't correlate reliably with standard credentials.
The 8-figure exit segment is carefully told. Lieberman is transparent about the decision-making process: they took the Business Insider offer not because it was the highest offer, but because it provided the infrastructure to compete for the enterprise advertising relationships they couldn't access independently. The honest subtext is that they weren't sure they could maintain growth without that leverage — and they were right to be uncertain.
Key Ideas
- →Morning Brew's 0-to-100K growth was engineering, not content virality: campus ambassador programs and referral optimization drove acquisition, with content quality functioning as retention and word-of-mouth, not acquisition.
- →The 'nontraditional hires' pattern: bringing in journalists and writers with intellectual curiosity over domain specialists produced better editorial quality than conventional media hiring practices would have suggested.
- →The Entrepreneurs Operating System (EOS) implementation at scale — a management framework Lieberman used to keep Morning Brew functioning as a real company rather than a charismatic-founder operation.
- →How to start a newsletter in 2025 differs fundamentally from 2019: the referral program arbitrage no longer exists, paid acquisition is more competitive, and the only sustainable path is a distribution deal or a pre-existing audience.
- →The 8-figure exit decision: Lieberman and Rief took a deal that wasn't the highest bid because the acquirer provided access to enterprise advertising relationships they couldn't build independently.
Worth Remembering
Lieberman's admission that Morning Brew's early growth would be impossible to replicate today — referral programs that worked in 2018 are now oversaturated, and the campus ambassador model doesn't scale the same way.
The EOS implementation story: watching a scrappy newsletter startup adopt a formal management operating system, and the resistance they encountered from team members who thought it was too corporate.
Austin Rief's take on what he'd do differently — a candid answer that reveals more about the decisions they regret than the decisions they got right.
Sam pushing on whether the Hustle and Morning Brew were really competing, and the honest answer that they were in the same category but targeting slightly different readers — a distinction that mattered for advertiser positioning.