Morning Brew

How to create value from a broke, flaky, uncommitted audience

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This week, I’m promoting Newsletter XP, a course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter.

The undeniable star of the Newsletter XP show is co-host Alex Lieberman.

​​In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, an email newsletter covering the day’s business news. Within five years, he built up Morning Brew into a 9-figure company. In 2020, he sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew for $75 million.

There’s a bit in the monetization section of Newsletter XP where Alex is asked to give an example of how he pitched big brands like IKEA on buying six-figure ad packages in Morning Brew.

​​Alex obliges.

He delivers a 1 min 24 second masterclass — the pitch he performed 10 times a day, every day, for three years.

​​His pitch is truly impressive because what he is really selling is an audience of 18-30 year olds, largely broke, uncommitted, and flaky — not an audience any serious business would be excited to advertise to.

And yet, Alex does it with such enthusiasm, cleverness, and conviction, that by the end of his pitch, I bet the IKEA marketing execs were begging him to run their ad, versus the other way around.

Once again, this pitch was how Morning Brew got to tens of millions of dollars a year in ad revenue, before Alex cashed out for $75 million.

You can use Alex’s IKEA pitch to inform your own sales strategy if you want to start a newsletter and you’re bent on selling ads to big brands for a lot of money.

Or, you can use Alex’s pitch to guide where you take your newsletter.

Because you might not be getting into the newsletter business to hang out on LinkedIn and pitch marketing managers 10 times a day.

​​The good news is, Newsletter XP gives you real options for both the ad-supported path to monetizing your newsletter, as well as the no-ad path, where you simply create content you love and get paid well to do it.

It’s all there inside the course.

​​I’m promoting Newsletter XP until Monday, Feb 25, at 12 midnight PST. During this promotion, you can get $200 off the usual price of Newsletter XP. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

The best source of info for starting a successful newsletter

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I checked just now. I first wrote about Alex Lieberman in this newsletter back in June 2020. Here are the first three sentences of what I wrote then:

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In 2015, Alex Lieberman started sending a daily email to 45 friends and classmates at the University of Michigan. Each email was empty except for a PDF attachment. The PDF was made from an ugly Word doc template, and contained a fun-to-read summary of the top business news for that day.

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That email described the beginnings of Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter about business news.

By June 2020, Alex had managed to grow Morning Brew to about $20 million a year in ad revenue.

Later in 2020, Alex sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew for $75 million.

After finding out about Alex Lieberman and how successful he had mad Morning Brew, I got kind of obsessed.

I’d long been interested in running a magazine-like email newsletter. And here was somebody doing it, and making millions off it.

So when I found out that Alex Lieberman was actually hosting a course, all about how to create a successful Morning Brew-like newsletter, I jumped on it.

The course was called Newsletter XP.

It was hosted and presented by Alex and Tyler Denk, who was employee #2 at Morning Brew and who is now the CEO of Beehiiv.

As you might know, Beehiiv is the email service platform that makes it easy to create a Morning Brew-like newsletter, and that’s currently used by newsletter successes like Milk Road (the biggest crypto newsletter)… the Rundown (the biggest AI newsletter)… and Arnold’s PUMP CLUB (the Gubernator’s personal newsletter).

Point being, Alex and Tyler have strong credentials for talking about newsletter success.

And inside Newsletter XP, they do so. They tell you how to create a newsletter if you want to succeed, and perhaps more importantly, how not to create a newsletter if you want to succeed.

Because there have been thousands or tens of thousands of newsletters launched over the past few years. But only a small fraction have become real businesses.

The secrets of the successful are within Newsletter XP.

The course doesn’t only feature Alex and Tyler.

​​It’s also got Codie Sanchez of Contrarian Thinking (8-figure business, wrote about her a couple days ago)… Max Tcheyan of Puck News (40k paid subscribers at $16/month, $70 million valuation)… Kendall Baker (Axios Sports, ~500k subscribers)… and a bunch more people who have been behind the biggest newsletter success stories, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in value.

I first wrote to the people at Beehiiv last summer, and asked to promote Newsletter XP then.

I didn’t hear back anything.

I wrote again. Still nothing.

But I was not deterred.

​​I kept following up.

Eventually they agreed.

The hook was in! ​​Now that they agreed to let me promote Newsletter XP, I asked to have a discount over the regular price. Because why else would anybody buy now?

Since they had already agreed to let me promote, they agreed to the discount as well. Commitment and consistency for the win.

So starting tomorrow, and ending Monday, Feb 25, at 12 midnight PST, I will be promoting Newsletter XP, at a substantial discount over what it sells for normally.

If you are interested in starting a big-success newsletter, you will want to read my emails starting tomorrow.

And if you’re not interested, you still might want to read my emails, because I will be sharing and teasing the best stuff I personally got this star-studded training.

Valuable positioning idea inside

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For the past year, I have been writing a second newsletter, one about health. About ten days ago, on a whim, I changed the name of it.

I’m still not publicly sharing either the old or the new name of my health newsletter, because the CIA asked me not to.

But I want to tell you something curious that’s happened following the name change.

So let’s pretend my old newsletter was named Morning Brew, which it was not. But Morning Brew is a big and popular email newsletter that covers the day’s business news, so you might know it.

My health newsletter’s old name was something like Morning Brew. Cute, possibly clever, with a brandable tinge to it.

But ten days ago, I decided to kill the cuteness, cut the possible cleverness, and go for clarity instead of branding.

As a result, my health newsletter is now called something like, Daily Business Newsletter. Again, that’s not the actual name, but it should give you an idea.

Now here’s the curious thing that happened:

As soon as I made that switch, I started getting organic traffic from Google. Finally — the first organic traffic I got after about 11 months of regular posting of content to my website.

And apparently, it’s high-quality traffic, because these Google-sent visitors are opting in to the newsletter at a clip of about 10-15 per day, double-opting in, and will hopefully be reading and buying in the future.

To be fair, this might be absolute coincidence.

Or, if it’s not coincidence, it might be something that’s not repeatable for anyone else, or even for me.

Or, maybe there’s something there. Maybe it’s an illustration of a valuable positioning idea I read once:

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For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.

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That idea comes from of the best marketing books I’ve ever read. It’s one of the best as long as you read it carefully and slowly, rather than skimming through it to “get the gist.”

And no, it’s not the same book I recommended yesterday, and it’s not written by Dan Kennedy.

If you think you know what this book is, or you want to know, you can find it revealed at the other end of this link:

https://bejakovic.com/lost

Invest in your 1000 true high-paying fans

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On February 1st, I got an email with the subject line, “Invest in your newsletter.”

“I sure like the sound of investing,” I said to myself. “And I do have a newsletter.”

The background is this:

I had recently signed up for Beehiiv, which is something like Substack, only you have to pay a monthly fee for it.

Beehiiv was created by Tyler Denk, who was an early employee at Morning Brew. Morning Brew is now a $75+ million business, based around a daily email that covers the day’s business news.

I signed up for Beehiiv because I’ve started a Morning Brew-like newsletter. It has nothing to do with marketing or copywriting, and it’s in a different format than what you are currently reading.

So that’s the background. Now that we’re caught up, let’s get back to that February 1st “Invest in your newsletter” email.

Tyler of Beehiiv was writing me that email to give me the opportunity to pay him $499 for his course on starting a newsletter.

So I did.

​​I sent Tyler $499 and I got access to this course, called Newsletter XP. And I got to listen to a bunch of big people in the newsletter space, including Morning Brew’s founder and CEO, share their ideas experiences on content strategy and growth and newsletter monetization.

People in this “newsletter operator” space don’t seem to be as miserly as people in the direct marketing space about sharing ideas that are normally behind a paywall. In fact, Tyler encouraged people to tweet the most valuable ideas they got from his Newsletter XP course.

I don’t tweet, so let me email you the most valuable idea I got from this course.

This most valuable idea came in the next-to-last session. One of the guests in that session was Codie Sanchez.

​​Codie runs Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter with some 250,000 subscribers, about buying and selling businesses. She’s built an eight-figure info business off the back of that newsletter, plus maybe several other 7-figure businesses also, plus I guess even the newsletter itself pays her well since she can promote relevant money-related offers.

And maybe most impressive of all, Codie has done all this since corona started.

Anyways, here’s what Codie said that I found most valuable:

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I sort of believe your 1000 true fans — Kevin Kelly talks about this — they’re actually the fans you should charge the most to. Because they are your biggest fans. And where most people screw up when they do paid products is they launch their first product for $10 a month. Their 1000 true fans buy it for 10 bucks. They have cultivated this group of people who buy too low priced of products, which doesn’t allow you to create a real business which can further serve them.

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That’s it. That’s the most valuable idea that stuck with me from the first time going through Newsletter XP.

I’m thinking about it as I work on building up, and monetizing my other newsletter.

Maybe it’s something you too can think about if you are creating an audience, a list, a newsletter, whatever. Maybe you can think of it as the difference between salting the soil in your garden, just because salt is cheap and easy to get, or investing a bit of time to plant a walnut tree that actually takes root and provides shade and fruit for you and yours for years to come.

But enough of the Magic of Channeling Warren Buffett.

Unrelated to the core of this email, if you want to invest in copywriting skills, which can help if you are building up an audience or an email newsletter, I have a quick, compact, exercise-based course on that. For more info on it:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Best resource for newsletter growth ideas

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A couple days ago, copywriter and business owner Will Ward, who was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group at the same time as me, forwarded me an email from Quiet Light, an online business broker.

This email described — without naming it – a newsletter that’s for sale right now:

“Social good and transformation” space. 300,000 total subscribers. Paid subscribers totaling almost $50,000 per month in subscription revenue. Started in May 2020. On sale now because the owner is “eager to return to her previous endeavors.” Asking price? $2.55 million.

Those numbers and dates made me wonder where the hell I was in May 2020 and what the hell I was doing then. Well actually, I can tell you almost exactly.

Right around that time, in June 2020, I sent out an email, “Expert advice on how to start an email magazine,” in which I shared an interview with Alex Lieberman.

In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter with a summary of the day’s business news.

By 2020, Morning Brew was making $13 million per year in ad revenue. Later that year, in October 2020, Lieberman sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew to Business Insider for $75 million.

Like I wrote in that June 2020 email, I’d been thinking of starting a Morning Brew for X newsletter for a while, where X would be some topic I’m personally interested in.

Had I done it then, maybe today I’d be sitting on a multi-million dollar asset.

I didn’t do it then, but I did do it this past January. I started another newsletter, Morning Brew for X. X is my topic — something I’m interested in, and that I’m not sharing yet publicly. I want to grow this newsletter first and build up a bit of a moat before letting thousands of other marketers in on what I’m up to.

Anyways, as part of starting my own Morning Brew-like newsletter, I discovered there’s already a galaxy of Morning Brew-like newsletters, including many Ponziish Morning Brew-like newsletters that tell you how to grow your own Morning Brew-like newsletter.

My eyes were opened.

For years, I’d been living in the world of direct response-based, daily, Ben Settle-like emails that sell supplements or courses or dog toothbrushes. Most of those daily emails look pretty much the same, sound pretty much the same, and function pretty much the same — a good income or a nice back end.

Meanwhile, you have this cousin industry of people building $2.55 million and $13 million and $75 million businesses, using nothing other than email newsletters.

I’m not ragging on Ben Settle or his ideas. Those ideas, both for growing email lists and for monetizing them, have made me and my clients a healthy amount of money. But I do want to point out how much other stuff is happening in the world of email right now, adjacent to the little Amish world that’s centered on direct response copywriting and marketing.

Of course, this other, Morning Brew-like world has its own Amish tendencies. Also, there are literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of newsletters to choose from right now, all telling you how to make it as a creator or creative entrepreneur or a newsletter operator.

What’s worthwhile in this new world?

I can only tell you the best resource I have personally found. That’s Chenell Basilio’s Growth In Reverse.

Each week, Chenell does a deep dive into the growth strategies of a newsletter businesses — “deep” as in, it takes her 40+ hours of research to produce one of these analyses. For some reason, she does all this work and then gives it away for free.

Some of these strategies Chenell identifies I know about already. Some are new to me. Some are strategies I have no interest in trying myself myself. Some I think are very clever, and they already have me moving.

For example:

You can sign up to Chenell’s newsletter using the link below. It’s an affiliate link — though I’m not getting paid anything.

If you are curious why I’m promoting Chenell’s Growth In Reverse, beyond that it’s a great resource on how to grow your newsletter, and why I’m using an affiliate link, even though I’m not getting paid, then sign up to read her next email, which will arrive this Sunday.

​​Or sign up just because you want to grow your own newsletter and you want new ideas on how to do that. In any case, here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/chenell

An email business worth $0.52 billion (yes, billion)

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Never give away your best stuff for free, right?

Instead, use your free emails to sell high-priced products and subscriptions, right?

That’s certainly one way to run an email-based business. And it’s proven to work well for many people.

But is it the only way?

Let’s reach into the archives of this very newsletter, to a breaking story I wrote about two years ago.

Back then, I reported that the Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter without any backend offers, had sold a controlling stake for $75 million.

That’s not too shabby for a project that was started in a college dorm, by just one dude, some five years earlier.

Today I’ve got some similar, but even more greedy news for you.

It’s about Axios.

Axios is basically a collection of email newsletters on topics like politics, the economy, and technology. For example, I’ve been subscribed to their “Axios World” newsletter for a couple years.

Axios was launched in 2017 by three ex-Politico journalists.

And get this:

Axios, an email-based business that was started five years ago, just got sold for $525 million.

$525 million.

From my back-of-the-envelope math, that’s $25 million more than a half billion dollars. For a bunch of email newsletters. At a moment when everybody seems to be panicking about a recession.

So yes. Never give away your best stuff for free in your emails… not unless… you want a pool filled with gold coins in which you can go swimming like Scrooge McDuck.

Now of course, you can make the claim that Axios is much more than just a bunch of email newsletters.

You can make the claim that it’s a business like any other, with VC funding, a team of employees, and extensive advertiser relationships.

That’s absolutely true.

And it brings me to my offer for today.

It’s also something from the archives of this very newsletter, also from two years ago. Back then, I called this offer my “cash buyers list.”

It works like this:

I have certain skills at a high level, mainly around copywriting and content creation. I also have a simmering, lingering desire to start an email-based equivalent of a magazine, newspaper, or morning talk show that could grow grow into something cool and valuable in a few years’ time.

But I can’t do all that myself. Nor do I want to.

So if you have 1) money to invest or 2) complementary skills to mine, then I’d like to talk to you.

I’m not promising anything and I don’t have any project kicking off right now. But if the idea of something Axios-like or Morning Brew-like gets you excited… and you have something to contribute besides enthusiasm and an “eagerness to learn”… then write me an email and let me know what you can contribute.

If it turns out to be a fit in some way, and I manage to put the other pieces in place… then who knows where you and I and our email-based business might be in five years’ time.

How to make $75 million with an email newsletter

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News broke today that Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider.

Morning Brew, as you might know, is a daily email newsletter started a few years ago. The insight behind it was to take business news — a boring topic, thanks for nothing, Wall Street Journal — and make it more millennial-friendly.

Well it worked. Business Insider paid $75 million for a controlling stake in Morning Brew. Not bad for an email newsletter.

I bring this up for reasons one and two.

Reason one is that it fits my post from yesterday. That’s where I suggested that if you take a dry but useful topic and sexy it up, you can become a star. Or in the case of Morning Brew, you can earn yourself a $75 million buyout in about five years’ time.

Reason two has to do with my current romp through NLP axioms. The axiom I have in mind is,

“The past does not equal the future.”

In other words, even if a shadow has trailed you all your life — I mean a phobia, or some limiting belief, or just “how you are” — that doesn’t mean you cannot change, and change quickly.

That, in theory, is what NLP is all about. Of course, there are also other ways to effect change quickly.

For example, a few months ago I listened to an interview with Alex Lieberman, the founder of Morning Brew. Lieberman said how he can’t see any reason to sell his company.

Well, $75 million later, he found a reason.

“The past does not equal the future.”

Human brains love patterns and trends. But that’s not how the world works much of the time. Things can stay the same, day after day after day, and then suddenly — your tomorrow can be different.

Speaking of a different tomorrow:

I have a daily email newsletter. Its current valuation is -$39.17, which is what I’ve paid for the software to send the emails.

The insight behind my newsletter is to take the boring topics of marketing and copywriting and sexy them up. If you’d like to get on this rocket ship before it shoots to the moon, click here to subscribe.

Expert advice on how to start an email magazine

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In 2015, Alex Lieberman started sending a daily email to 45 friends and classmates at the University of Michigan. Each email was empty except for a PDF attachment. The PDF was made from an ugly Word doc template, and contained a fun-to-read summary of the top business news for that day.

Alex managed to make this daily email into a profitable business. That sounds pretty attractive to me, because I’ve been thinking about starting a new project.

What I’d love is to start a magazine, but magazines are dying or dead. Websites aren’t magazines either — there’s no real engagement or loyalty.

I realized that the closest thing today to my fantasy magazine is simply an email newsletter. But newsletter is an overloaded term. So let’s call it an email magazine.

Since I’m thinking about this, I wanted to do some learning from people who have been successful doing the same. Alex Lieberman, who I mentioned above, is definitely among them.

Since that PDF-based start in 2015, Alex moved his content fully into the email. He also grew his subscriber list from 45 people to over a million today. He doesn’t call his business a magazine, but he does accept ads, for which big corporations pay upward of $50k for a one-shot placement.

As of 2019, Alex’s daily newsletter, called Morning Brew, is making $13 million a year in ad revenue.

So I tracked down a detail-rich interview with Alex Lieberman. I think it could be valuable to you whether you want the details on how Alex built up Morning Brew… whether you too want to start an “email magazine”… or even if you want to grow an email list for a more grimy direct response business.

The good stuff in the interview starts after minute 22. I’ve linked to it below: