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

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller. All right, so we have Austin here, Austin Rief, founder of Morning Brew. I know how big you guys are. I don't know what the public numbers are. So I'll let you kind of say like, how big is the company now?

**Austin Rief** (1:14)
Yeah, 70, 75 million of revenue this year, a double digit profit margin, 250 people or so. Let's go.

**Shaan Puri** (1:28)
And it's kind of a crazy story. You guys started this, you guys were at college, right? You're at, is it Michigan, where you guys went to school?

**Austin Rief** (1:36)
Yeah, so we're at the University of Michigan. I applied to Duke, didn't get in, though, unfortunately.
And so I went to Michigan. Yeah, I went to a small private high school.
Sorry. No, Michigan worked out well. It was a little bit colder than Duke, but I mean, my goal was to go to the biggest school I could get into, other than an Ivy or Duke. So I got to Michigan, had no idea what I wanted to do, and everyone went to finance at Michigan. So I was like, oh, I gotta follow the herd. I was a sheep following the herd straight into the world of corporate finance or investment banking, and then stumbled upon this guy, Alex Lieberman, who was, like, I wouldn't even call it a newsletter. It was a PDF attached to an email. He actually took a, he made a Word document, he would PDF it and put it to an email, and that was the first newsletter.

**Shaan Puri** (2:24)
So, he was already doing it, was it called Morning Brew?

**Austin Rief** (2:27)
No, it was called Market Corner. It was way more market-based, way more finance-oriented.

**Sam Parr** (2:32)
Was he in college as well, or had he graduated?

**Austin Rief** (2:35)
Yeah, so he was two years older than I was, and that's a big part of our success, to be honest.
If I was his age, we probably would have went out and raised venture capital. So, you know, 2015, you have Buzzfeed raising money, Vice raising money, and the only reason we didn't follow that path was because I was in college and no one was going to fund a sophomore in college. And so Alex went to work at Morgan Stanley for 14 months.
I spent the summer in investment banking and was like, holy shit, this is miserable. Get me out of here. And so I was like, all right, well, I got this Morning Brew thing. I might as well do it for a couple of years. And what's the worst thing that happens? I come back here and that was the, that was the start of going full time.

**Sam Parr** (3:12)
What did your nice Jewish parents think about you not becoming a banker and instead working on a newsletter?

**Austin Rief** (3:18)
So my parents were actually okay with it, except I told them after my junior year, I said, I have one more year of college. What if I just don't go back? What if I don't finish?
And the idea of them spending $150,000 on three years of college and not finishing my senior year drove them nuts. So the deal we made is if I graduate and they were cool with me doing Morning Brew for a year or two after.