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: