Building and Scaling Niche with Morning Brew

Alexa Kristen. Welcome back at Landia. So Alexa, I am out in Hollywood, Los Angeles, which is so pertinent for our conversation. To open up today's show talking about the Emmys and our favorite show, ted Lasso ted Lasso Big Wins at the Emmy's. I love this show. It brings so much joy and laughter. And as we were getting ready for this record, talking a bit about how a series on Apple TV plus, I think it's interesting to think about how ted Lasso becomes brand and the ability

to permeate the world of business management. You have some thoughts around this uh commerce fandom in a different way. So knowing we're going to talk to our friends at the Morning Brew about niche community building through media, I thought this would be a fun place to start. I think it's a great place to start. I love ted

Lasso as well. Then when I see on Twitter on LinkedIn people talking about the business and management like leadership lessons of ted Lasso, quoting the show and Laura, when you and I were talking about this, I said, there's an extension here, like an obvious extension of ted Lasso NBA Crash Course or ted Lasso Leadership Course. There's so much opportunity to start thinking about that content as a

jumping off point for additional products. And I think that if Hollywood looked at product and product market fit and seeing that there is a huge product market fit around a business community that's dying for leadership lessons, that actually makes you think a little bit differently, And isn't this kind of heavy slog of learning? And I think that that note that kind of heavy I'll call it my This is such an Alexis m right, the heavy schlog

of learning. But I think the point is is that there's so many places in spaces where content can show up and have a different um meaning or feed a different audience that maybe it originally didn't seek out to do, but they're finding that they have major footholds or fandom by creating these types of extensions or new products, and

I think that's exactly what morning Brew has done. Alex and Austin on the show they talk about in this episode of how they thought about building niche communities, and from a marketer perspective, I'm still kind of amazed that a lot of marketers get caught in the kind of mass media game versus building for niche audiences over and over and over in mass and finding these areas and building products to create fandom, to create what I call participation,

So then you start to think about your metrics. Someone asked me about, um, you know, how we were measuring things at GE last week, and I said, well, we went from the typical shares and likes and those types of things into participation. And for my perspective, I was talking about the podcast. I was talking about the message and how fans were popping up fan fiction and how they were doing cosplay. That is huge for a brand, and I think that morning Brew understands this concept kind

of fundamentally. I think Alex really started to see this when he started really started to see that pull of the of the market demand. Even at you know, University

of Michigan where they started this. The kind of focal point of the conversation that we have with them is around really starting to think about content and building content as products products for niche audiences and serving those audiences UM in a way where they can't get um, what you're giving somewhere else, and then allowing and this is huge, allowing those audiences to create in and around your I P. Because we are getting to the place where participation and

ownership is king. These are the conversations around all the n f T s, around crypto and content and so as marketers start to think about, how do I allow my audience to start to participate and have maybe a piece of ownership, even if it's informal, Um, how do we ignite imagination or creativity with our audiences? That starts to become a very different model of media. UM. Then

I think we've seen before. Yeah, there's certainly the product roadmap that this requires, right, and moving from foreign factors to franchises and thinking about, you know, how you build for communities, engage with communities, And then there's a conversation for the c R oh, right, and the sales teams

and how they're packaging this. So many times over the last few years on this show we've talked about, you know, sitting down with publishers talking about their pitch, and nine times out of ten those pitch decks have started with how many peoples reach right? If it starts with we have an audience of X, it's a wildly different entry point when you're talking about participation and how you price that accordingly. And with that, we'll be right back with

Alex and Austin, co founders of Morning Brew. Alright, ed Landia, we are back with our partners that yield Mo. If you remember, we spent our first mini series talking about how yield Mo works with brands to make audience attention actionable, and in this mini series we take on how contextual targeting is being reimagined as brands make every interaction with their consumer meaningful. Welcome Lisa Bradner, GM of Data and Analytics from yield Mo. Thank you so much, great to

be back. Always great to talk to you guys. So Lisa, talk to us about what is yield Mo, What do you do at yield Mo, and how are you working with your clients sure, Yelm is a smart exchange. We are focused on increasing the value of advertising inventory for buyers and sellers. We do that through data and my job is to help bring the right data to bear so that we can help brands find the best impressions for their goals and do so in a privacy safe

way that is right for consumers. So Lisa and helping brands find the right data. How much does context factor into that? And how is yield MO framing context as you bring data forward to your clients At the highest level, context is everything right? It's how do we show up as brands in an appropriate way when we're wanted, when we're helpful and deliver a service so that we are just accepted as being in the right place at the right time. Super easy to say, super hard to do. Right.

It's kind of the marketing holy grail. But what we look at is the data. Everything that's happening in the moment and AD is served, and we look at all of that data to understand what's going on, what's surrounding that ad, where is that AD showing up, what devices it on, is the person viewing that ad paying attention to that add and spending time with it. We look at everything that has happening in that instant and helps clients figure out when they're advertising is landing and when

maybe it isn't landing as well as it could. So why do you think that contextual targeting is gaining increasing importance in today's marketplace? So I think when you say contextual targeting, that means different things to different people. But at the highest level, we are on a half of having less data available about the people were serving ads to. Right, So Google is sunsetting third party cookies. Apple is already

blocking on Safari third party cookies. It is harder and harder for marketers to connect the data about an individual and how they move across the web. So without that data that marketers have become really reliant on, it's contextual is the alternative of how do I show up in the right way without leaning too hard on individuals private data. But what Yale MO is looking at is you know, contextual. One Datto was, hey, here's an article about travel, let's

serve a travel ad um. We're not going that literal. We're looking to understand from the data. Let the let the ad experience tell us what ads are working with what content and what context and what time and what device and what place so that the data that comes back can be modeled by machines and tell advertisers where and when and how to place their ads. Contextual advertising, right and you talk about kind of at its highest level,

has lots of different kind of meanings and machinations. But contextual advertising has become very in vogue in light of the cookie conversation. So cookies going away, which we know got pushed back right in terms, go push the time back. However, it's a really interesting time for marketers to be thinking differently about contextual advertising. Why and why has it come back into such kind of a focus for for marketers.

It's a great question because I think there was a portion of the marketing world that when Google delayed the cookie deprecation, when people I don't have to think about that right now, right right, but the smart money is saying this is real. I'm already actually losing a lot of iOS users, and most marketers if they went in and really studied their programmatic campaigns, I think they would be surprised to see that often their campaigns are going

to Android users. That's not because the android users are necessarily their best customers. It's because the Android users are the ones that they can match to their audience. So they're already missing a whole lot of iOS customers and they may not even be realized realizing that yet. But the smart marketers are seeing that, are realizing that their audience is going to get harder and harder to find.

So on the one hand, they're upping their loyalty strategy to get a lot of first party data, but on the other hand, they're starting to test and learn new ways of expanding reach, new ways of finding efficiency, new ways of communicating and reaching out to their audience without relying on first, second, or third party data. Lisa, this is a great start to the conversation and we look forward to having you back for part two. And we are back on the mic with our friends from Morning

Brew at Landia. Let's give a big welcome co founders, Austin Reef and Alex Lieberman. Welcome to Atlantia. Welcome, thanks so much, thank you. Yeah, we were just saying as we were getting ready to come into the episode, this is like total fans of m all things in the Twitter feed, so we're excited to have you and bring this conversation I r L kind of kind of it's it's better than on Twitter, but not as good as

in person. You both are very vocal founders and business leaders who are constantly sharing the journey that you both have been on in building your business. One of the things that struck Alex and I as marketers is something that you posted Alex talking about the most underrated entrepreneurial skill is storytelling. UM and as this is a podcast that is largely dedicated to the power of it, would love to hear you know what that means to you.

And as you started, as you said, with the product in a vision, it was really storytelling that catapulted Morning Brow. Can you take us into that. Yeah, you know, my thought around this is Austin and I both went to an undergrad business program at Michigan, and I would say most people in the underground business program we're we're fighting for kind of the same three categories really two categories

of jobs investment, banking, UH and management consulting. And I think as a function of that, most people focused on attaining the skills that made the most sense for those jobs, So things like you know, financial analysis, accounting, operations UM and you know, don't get me wrong, those are really important things. Those are skills that you know, any business

professional should have proficiency in. But what was always interesting to me is that the skill, whether you want to call it sales or communication or storytelling, it wasn't talked about a lot. There was one class that everyone took that was a joke for most people in business communications. And you know, the reason I tweeted about that was just in reflecting on kind of what are the biggest things that I think most founders are entrepreneurs leverage in

order to propel their business forward. I think storytelling has to be in kind of the top three of not the number one. Yet it's not people aren't incentivized to really get great at storytelling, uh in college. And when I posted about that, I was kind of just referring to verbal storytelling, but I think it actually is more broad than that. It's verbal storytelling, it's written storytelling, and

it's visual storytelling. And I think we've seen examples of great creators or experts in those different areas build massive audiences on the Internet because people are realizing on the Internet and not necessarily in school, how important those things are. I look at the number of newsletter lad businesses that have emerged over the last blood's even call it twelve

to eighteen months. There are a number of choices when thinking about the plot of your story on paper, it could look similar to a lot of other value props that are out there. What would you say was the plot twist of Morning Brew that could take it from the product you rolled out with two really where you hope to see this business grow? I think the plot

twist was, Well, there's a few. The first one was when we identified very early on that the content was not just for college students, but it was for everyone. At first was Alex who was really doing for his friends and they were doing for other colleagues or just people in the business school. But when we went to our internships or our jobs and we realized that this wasn't just for college students, those for professionals as well.

That was a big moment where the market went from college kids, which is a nice market, but not that big and not that valuable, to be totally honest to everyone, and we had CEOs of big companies reading, and we had investment banking analysts, and so that was the first thing, who was the first big CEO that you saw subscribe? There was the year of Time Warner Cable, who ended up investing in Morning Brew. Early on, he was I'd say, the first big person who we didn't know signed up,

and then we found out signed up. We used to every night go through the list and see who was signed up. I think the second thing was Alex and I both knew the tone and voice we wanted to hit on in every single newsletter. We know we couldn't do that. We know that we knew that we had the vision, but we couldn't execute it on every single day,

every single sentence of every single news letter. We could do it for small chunks a sentence, a paragraph, maybe even a single newsletter, but not six five days a year. And when we found writers who could write in the tone we wanted it written in, that was the second inflection point, aha moment whatever, which was okay, now we can focus on the business really early on me growth, Alex,

sales even because we had some content people. That was the second really big moment where we knew the audience and then we do the content and get hit. And the third was sales. It was can we get brands to advertising Morning Brew, and can we continue to champion this idea of creating native advertising? Right, we knew banners weren't gonna we were going to build a big business off of the backs of banner ads in the newsletters. So once those three hit the audience, the content and sales,

we knew we had a business. Who is your first paid partner? It was Emlahart, a college memorabilia business that did like branded college rings and other you know, college apparel. It was an eight hundred dollar ad. They bought three of them total, and the only reason we got it was because one of our original investors in The Brew, he had a relationship with them and he said he was helping us earn some beer money. So that was that was the first advertisement partner. The first one we'd

like earned for ourselves was the University of Jena. And the first big partner was discover Card. What was the time frame from Memorabilia to discover Card. We'll Discover Card we started speaking to when I was in Michigan, because I'll never forget they came to us and they said we're going to send you an RFP, and I immediately said that sounds Great and Google. When RFE was I had I had no idea, not a clue, I mean just I couldn't even begin to guess what it was.

But so I just remember pacing in the auditorium at Michigan just talking on this call with senior marketers at one of the agencies. I can't remember which one. It

was about Discover. So that was the beginning of seventeen and they were tossing around numbers, like I remember, they said they were gonna r FPS for a hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty thousand, and five hundred thousand, and basically what I had to tell them was for five hundred thousand, they could own the company five times over. And we had liked subscribers. Maybe he's not he's not joking. It was like sending like Alex and my mom like that.

That was the list. The CMO of Discover card her daughter, I believe, introduced her to Morning Brew and so she reached out to the agency saying, Hey, what they're doing is really cool. I would love to partner with them. So the agency thought, oh, Morning threw, they're butted up all of this stuff, and it was just Alex nine and we had no idea what we're doing, so it wasn't even there's not you couldn't fake it till you

make it right. At some point, it's just so ridiculous, and so we had to come clean like, yeah, this is ridiculous, you know we we can't do it there with a half million dollars. But the big thing we did is we said, but how many subscribers do we need to have for you to actually care about us? Because at the time we didn't know, we weren't sure it was a ten thousand, fifty hundred thousand, a million.

We had this idea that we could get to a place where big brands would care about us, but we did know what that point was, and they started throwing out numbers like a hundred thousand subscribers, and so that for a while is our north star. And I think around end of seventeen, that's when we started to work with them, was when we actually had thousand subscribers. So I was listening to how I built this with Gyraz and I think Austin, you were talking about the future

of media is definitely niche and distributed. What does that mean in your business today? And how do you think about niche and scale. I think oftentimes people confuse the word niche and small. Niche doesn't mean small. What we're learning is that the Internet is a very large place. There's a lot of people in the world, and these niches can have tons and tons and tons of followers. And so at first we call ourselves this niche publication, and to some extent we still are people who want

to consume. Whom to want to opt in, to consume business news in a newsletter in a conversational tone every single day is fairly niche. It's not huge. But now we start thinking about, Okay, we have this audience of three million plus, and of course you want to scale that and get that bigger. But that's not the only way we view growth anymore. We have a goal at Morning Brew do two things. One make people better at their job, and we do that through our B two

B publications as we call them. So we have retail Brew, we have marketing Brew, we have Emerging Tech Brew. So to use one of those as an example, we for retail Brew, we try to think about how many different ways can we serve a retail professional events, podcasts, you know what it, whatever may be within that vertical. And so right now we have newsletters, web content, and events, and we're contan think about what else is next, could

be job boards or whatever else. But on the other side of things that's not job specific or industry specific, we think about up how can we make well rounded business minds. And there's four categories were really interested there, business, money, career, and lifestyle. And so as you break those down, like so, taking for example, money, we're going to think about how can we create content in the money vertical. It's mostly

personal finance and investing. So you could argue investing is niche, but the number of people who would like to consume investing content in some way, whether it's a Twitter video or Instagram post or a podcast, is really really large. So we're just starting to break down the content we create and target these niches that our audience cares about. But my belief is these niches of productivity or investing are really really big. Alexa and I used to meet

with media, you know, sales teams all the time. We were coming in from you know, big legacy networks and publications to niche startups and the common denominator slide Slide number one was how many people you reach? Right, Like Austin you said the first question he has, well, how many how many subscribers do we have to get to

to actually validate the cost you're willing to pay. But what if at the time those twenty thousand readers we're spending on average, you know, an hour plus with Morning Brew content in the community, we're deeply engaged were advocates for the brands who were a part of the Morning Brew community, would that be worth five thousand dollars. It's a really interesting question. Yeah, I mean, I would just

say that it all comes down to incentives. Right when you think what you guys are talking about, how it's like crazy thinking about audience in mass scale and not having focus and monetizing that. But I think when you think about incentives drive people, it starts making sense why brands m why publishers have valued the wrong things in the past. The incentive for the marketer at the brand in the past was to make their boss happy. What their boss valued was getting in front of exactly one

ship ton of people. And so if you could get in front of that many people and make your boss happy, you were happy because your boss was happy with you on the publisher side, if you had a business model that forced you to get in front of tons of eyeballs because your costs were high, you needed to be a big scale to create any sort of margin for your business. Again, your incentive is to get a lot of people reading to make the economics of your business work.

I think in order to think in this what feels like a common sense way, your incentives need to be aligned with thinking through common sense. So common sense KPI s look like I mean, I would just basically say the reason we've been able to think about things in this way is it all started with I would say, at the core, the value of curation. The value of curation is what allowed us with one newsletter to have the same number of writers when we had ten thousand,

a hundred thousand and three million readers. And when you have the same cost basis and you continue to grow your audience, your margin grows, and so you don't have to worry about like, obviously we want to scale Morning Brus audience, but we're just as interested in getting people into our ecosystem through things that aren't just our daily newsletter, and also retaining and engaging our daily newsletter readers with

other things that we create. We don't have the incentive to have to get from three million to ten million just for the sake of having enough margin as a business to have a business that makes sense. Yeah, and most businesses, especially legacy I guess now their legacy. I don't mean The Times or the Journal, but some of these publishers who are popular on the Internet for fifty years, they monetize their content with ads or round their content

banner ads, programmatic pre roll. We're not going to compete with BuzzFeed and Vice on SEO in search terms. We're just not going to do it. That they've be on the Internet for two decades or however long they've been around. So we have to compete by building brands that people are passionate about, that they care about, and partner with brands in really clever ways to generate higher CPM ADS.

But the CPM the higher CPM ADS makes sense because it's not this banner that's chasing around the Internet, but it's actually an integration into our podcast, into our social To Austin's point, this whole thing is like, if we can create great niche content, what you're effectively doing is targeting a specific psychographic, a specific problem that's being solved

or passion that's being filled for our audience. And so by doing that, you have the ability to not just create content in one place, but create content around like an actual franchise in a brand. And what that allows you to do is that when you go to market and partner with a brand, you know, they're not just getting native ads in Morning Brew. They're not just getting placement in a social post. They're not just getting a

host reading a podcast. They're getting all of the things to exist everywhere and aligned fully with the franchise that is focused on a specific niche you know. So for Heineken Um, we're working with them on their zero point zero or zero zero product, which is their non alcoholic beer, and they get to align with Business Casual, which is the more key podcast product at Morning Brew, but we

don't even refer to it as a podcast anymore. It is a franchise that has podcast, that has newsletter that has social content that also gets extended into our daily newsletter, and Heineken zero zero get those touch points in all four places that I just mentioned, so that one stands out to me. The other one that stands out to me was the work that we did with Fidelity with Fresh Invest, where we created a custom, uh interview style podcast with them. It was a limited series where basically

I was the host. I would introduce Fresh Invest, I would talk through the biggest things happening in the markets in the last few days, and then I would interview a Fidelity employee who was an expert in one of the topics of the financial markets news that I was covering in that episode. And we did that as a limited series. It ended up getting you know, two x the downloads that we were expecting on the show. Um, you know, we're we're talking about another season for that

coming up. But that was a really good experience of you know, if you look at the ratings for the podcast, if you look at people's experience, people felt like it was a genuine content franchise where they learned about the financial markets from experts, and it just so happened to be created in partnership with Fidelity. That's awesome. I love, love love that you guys are talking about ecosystems and franchises actually like ecosystems because when you start to think

about who's created I P and content ecosystems. You start thinking about Disney, Marvel, blah blah blah blah ba. There haven't been a lot of publishers who have created these types of They've tried, Laura and I have like sat with some of them. They've tried, but unsuccessfully. I think in the past um who have really created these sustainable

ecosystems all based on specific audiences. As you guys started thinking about this, was this an intentional build There's a little rhetorical question, but like it was this an intentional build into ecosystems and franchises? Was it? Were you looking at the entertainment world and starting to see what was happening in the last you know, seven eight years in terms of like really building out that i P. What led you to the infrastructure here and the kind of

framework that you're going after. I think there are a few great examples of the people are companies that are doing this that really inspired us. And so to your point, yeah, I mean the scale players aren't doing this. They don't need to. And in fact, it's probably to be honest, those scale players that's probably disrupting themselves. They probably can't do it. Just it's not in their DNA to build this.

But you look at if you're familiar with the Churning group in their portfolio, whether it's Food fifty two or Meat Eater or bar Stool or Crunchy Role, any of these franchise, they've taken these niche audiences. Now they're doing it with Golden Auctions, which is an auctioneer house there that that's actually more commerce, and now they're going to build out content. I assume they've done a really interesting

job there. Same with if you look at the Ringer, they've done a really interesting job with some of this and e sports teams you look at hundred Thieves or these other sports teams, they've done a better job than most media companies of building franchises and building passion audiences and selling them commerce and selling them tickets to gain to you in person, the sports competitions and events. Those are some of the people we looked at. His inspiration

for what we're doing. Was it premeditated? Though? Like that I want to get because what I love when you were talking about in the how I built this, and I think it was really honest And I have to commend you guys on your um on your kind of level of transparency UM, building in public and and doing it what feels really earnestly UM, which is super refreshing and absolutely a part of your brand, which you've already

kind of talked about. I started listening in the Founders Journal and one of the things that you said was we really kind of didn't know we used our naiveness about the media business to actually succeed here when you're talking about franchising this stuff out in these ecosystems is actually a pretty big deal in terms of a business

infrastructure and thinking through this. So was that premeditated? What I would say is to the point of us building in a in a naive fashion, I would say for the majority of the life of the business, that is how things went down. And um. You know, Paul Graham has a great essay about independent thinking and one of the you know, when when he tries to to guide people through how can you be a more independent thinker, one of the things he always refers to is having

a beginner's mindset. What is one of the best ways to have the beginner's mindset is literally to have a beginner's mind is like not even know this. The way that things have been done. That is how we started building our business because we had no exposure to media. And when you asked about how have we gone into ecosystems, I think it was more just like us thinking linearly about serving our audience and also what brands were asking for.

So it's like we started with newsletters and then we said, well, one, we wanted to diversify away from just creating newsletter content, and our audience doesn't just read newsletters when they read about business. That's what guided us to podcasting because we said, what Morning Brows built is a really intimate relationship with a really obsessive audience. There's nothing more intimate than hearing a personality or a brand speaking to in your ears.

And then as we've gone into other things, whether it be social content, going more into video content, going into events, that has been furthering that narrative of what are all the ways that we can serve the modern business leader in the two big needs that Austin talked about, um,

how can we do all of those things? And at the same time, we've heard from brands how what they hope to do is get in front of our audience in a way where they are hitting multiple touchpoints of that ecosystem where truly feels like in an ecosystem and not just a single product placement here, in a single product placement there. I would say, Now, you know, especially with Austin at the HELM, we are way more meditated

in how we are building out these ecosystems. But I say for the vast majority of the business, it was really linearly thinking about what does our audience want and also what are brands asking for? Well, I think it's a difference between franchises versus form factors when you think about what leads right, especially from a consumer standpoint, to stop leading with the form factor first, but is the perspective and community that we are building as creators that

we should be putting the premium against. It's funny you bring this up. We've been talking about this a lot

of the Brew. We spoke the last year about this transition from newsletter company the media company, and all that means is we transition from a medium which is newsletter to multi platform and we now lead with whatever platform best serves the audience in that niche, with the talent, personalities, whatever we have, and so as we go into personal planants, if it makes sense to be newsletter heavy, well be news letter heavy. If makes sense to be video heavy,

will be video heavy. And so initially we people did call us a newsletter, and most people still think of us as a newsletter of business. I did to think a while. I think my goal is where a lot of people actually discover us, not through Morning Crew, right, they listen to Business Casual and they're like, oh, I didn't either one what is Morning Brew? Or I didn't Morning Brew has this podcast? That'd be awesome. And if

we can do that in all these verticals. And this is not a one or three even three or five year vision, this is this takes years. You look at the companies have successfully done this. Food fifty two is a great example. It's taken a long time. A really meat Eaters another one. If you're not famili to media, they're a really interesting brand and no one really talks about it's at least not in the New York City

media circuit because they cover hunting and fishing. But that company has scale tremendously and now they have all their oy have a ton of brands, they bought a commerce brands. They're selling hunting gear and you can only sell product product to your audience, they actually care a value. You can't sell things to your audience and they don't care

a value, And so that that's the goal. Are there other bets as you think about this modern business leader you're serving that push media beyond form fact there, but push media as we know it into new territories that perhaps some of the legacy competitors in your category aren't thinking about. But you know that the customer is interested in. So we have a ways to go till we're really there.

Right So right now we're testing out this this cohort based course called MBA, which our first test into non ad based revenue, and it's really exciting. But I see a world in which we're not just the media brammit. We're a consumer brand where people don't. Yes, we create content, but just like every commerce brand out there trying to create content, I think we can beat all of them to create commerce. And so that core based course is

one thing we're doing. But I see a world in which we have content and investing in content and business news and content and productivity and maybe in the productivity vertical. We have a morning Row journal that helps you journal every day, and that's a I don't know, you buy that every three months or so, and that's a product

that franchise sells. And maybe we have financial products in the investing vertical, and maybe in the news vertical we have a community that talks about certain types of news. And in retail, which is the B two B side of things, we have a once a year annual event. So, just like the other companies I mentioned, have evolved over time and started to build out different types of content, blur the lines between what's a content company what's just a consumer brand. That is where we're in up play.

But we have a lot of work to be done in terms of just we just started to build on social and build video and the five we have one we have two two podcasts Always Only and then one podcast Alex mentioned we did as a one off, and so we just scratched the surface in terms of what we're capable of doing. And so we have a lot of runway in terms of what we can get done and we're really excited about being able to do all of that. This takes really specific talent. How are you

guys thinking about creative talent and hiring creative talent? Is there a different kind of requirement or person you're looking for. We have been incredibly talented team we have. It's you know, it's not specific, Alex. It's more creative than I am, so she can talk more about the people we have on the team. But we just hire really talented creative people. Yeah, I mean, I would just say that people always ask us how is our writing so good? And there really

is no secret we hire incredible writers. We like to say we go unicorn hunting every time we hire eiter, because you need to find someone who is obsessed with the news, someone who is really well informed, someone who has great writing chops who writes with flow, who just like writes extremely well, and someone who's funny but isn't trying to write laugh out loud jokes, is able to intertwine humor with um and punch nous with the stuff

that they're writing. I think talent will work the same way, just in in a different type of context, with social or with multimedia. I mean, we're already seeing this right with Morning Bruce TikTok, which has gone from zero to twenty almost seven thou followers in a few months. Daniel Toomey who's been our talent on there um he was

an inbound person who applied to the business. We're just gonna have to change the lens through which we assess social audio or video talent, but we're gonna look for the same mix, which is who who are the p bold that are able to marry entertainment and information in a way that creates the morning grout voice that has become, you know, a special part of our I P. I want to go to like a quick speed round of questions.

What is a topic that you think in the business world that gets you so excited that you want to go deep on and no one's really covered it the right way or the way you want to cover it. I would say DEFY and recently reading up on DEFY, what is defy decentralized finance? And I'm sure people have

covered the right way. It's one of those things where I feel like such an outsider even trying to consume some of the content where I'll read a tweetstorm on DEFY and I'll see a term or a phrase or something that is a matter of fact in that conversation I don't know, and I'll look that up and I'll have no idea what that means. And then I'll read that and you have to keep on pulling back layers

the onion and then they just a really complex topic. Yeah, well, maybe a listener on the podcast can sponsor it, and then we'll do it. Alex, what about you topic? You know? Normally I say the creator economy, but I'm going to switch it up this time, and what I'm gonna say

is studying totally different businesses in other countries. That's a relevant thing for me just because, like recently, companies that I've been looking at are China based or India based, and you find entirely different models that haven't been tested or haven't reached um mass market in the US, and I think that's such an amazing arbitrage in general, like they're different, arbitrage is for business opportunities. One is creating

a business for a younger generation. That's been done for an older generation, but it hasn't been done for a younger generation. That's quite literally morning brew. I think another example of that arbitrage is studying businesses in other countries and then bringing them stateside. I think you're even starting to see that, like with the recent news around podcasts um and like Apple, Spotify, MPR introducing obviously paid podcasts like that that has existed in China for many years. Okay,

dream brand partner? Who is it? Lulu Lemon? Oh, tell me you wear men's Lulu Lemon. Yeah I'm wearing I'm wearing a lu Lemon right now. Yeah, I'm big, big Lulu guy. And now they own Mirror. You can really get a cool campaign with Mirror and Lulu Lemon. Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman, Model executive chairman, bring it all together? Well, Alex, who's your dream partner? So I'm gonna say this, because Austin did a realistic one, I'm gonna do an unrealistic one.

But it ever happened. I just go into retirement right then. And there is uh Tesla, not only because they don't spend on marketing, but I just envision a world in which, when it's fully autonomous, you have a whole campaign around what work looks like in an autonomous vehicle, and I think it would be sick. What is your legacy headline if you look back, when all is said and done, what would you like to sum up in a headline about Morning Brew? That's a question you should have asked

us to prepare for That's that's a that's a big one. Ah, this is cliche or it's a bad answer, But I want I mean we and we said this from day one. This was this analogy. We use the way that our parents generation, the way boomers look at the Wall Street Journal, especially the most passionate boomers, where they read it every day, but also they get the Wall Street Journal Wines magazine and they go to the wine tastings and all of that stuff, that type interaction and that type of uh

daily you know, thinking about that brand. Yeah, I want that to be the way people think about Morning Brew. But compelling that with the fact that we now the Internet and we have digital and does not a once You don't consue a paper once day, but you consume digital products all day long. And so that's the analogy I want people to make. Is Morning Brew did for for millennials or gen Z or whatever the Ultra Journal

did for boomers? What about you, Alex, Yeah, I would say it's uh just a different angle on the same type of take. Right, we're talking basically at the end of the day, our goal is ubiquity for our generation. UM I want rap songs to be written about us. I want people to reference the Brew on big TV shows that come out on Netflix, because when things like happened happen like that, you reach a level of cultural ubiquity that only happens when you've truly served an obsessive

audience for a long period of time. Before we go, we play a game with all of our guests. Bye bye bye. What would you get rid of? What would you buy or acquire? And what would you do yourself? I would buy on behalf of Morning grew a financial service company. I don't know what, but I do think eventually Morning Bruising get into financial products. So that's again, that's the ten year vision. I think I would create a tequila brand. Oh, now we're talking. Now we're talking

a partnership. Yeah, that's collaboration all the way. Spicy Margarita's or the official drink of Atlantia Tequila shots for the official drink of Austin Reefs. So, and what are what are you getting rid of? I would get rid of the sentiment that AD based businesses are bad. I think it is ludicrous and I think bad at they add based businesses are bad. So I think all bad businesses are bad, But I don't think all AD based business are bad just because a few people ran or poorly

ran AD based businesses. So you just landed yourself a keynote at the next I A B conference. What about you, Alex? This is a tough one. Um okay, So let's just start uh bye? What what would I bye? Well? I was going to say a find financial services company, because I think there's just a lot of technology we wouldn't want to figure out and we want from a partner.

But Austin said that, so I'm gonna go with I would buy a failed uh direct a consumer apparel brand, something like a Combatant Gentleman, a brand that did not work out well but is for the modern business leader and is what we think of quality products. But the economics and the business they just didn't run it prudently. I would buy that business. Who would I say by two? Or what would I say? By two? Um? I I would say by that I'm now I'm just cheating because

I said this on Twitter. I would say bye to the word orthogonal. I think it's such a usually start up word. It's a good word, but I just there has to be a better way to say what orthogonal means. And the only person who I give permission to use it as Ben Thompson because he uses it a lot, but he's also leagues UH smarter than all of us, so he can use it. And then by b y um a journal brand like I just think, especially the

Founders journals, the audience UH continues to grow. Literally can have a journal called Founders Journal or journal brand by Founders Journal that gets featured in all social content, with all recordings of episodes. And I think given we're we could actually literally create niche journal brands for decision journaling, for different job functions, for UH, for mental wellness, for professionals focused on like specific prompts for your mental health.

And the best thing about a journal business is not only the margin um, but also you can make it into almost a recurring revenue product where people use up all their pages and then they need to get the next journal. So, Alex Austin, if people want to get in touch with you to journal, make tequila or do business with the Brew, how can they get in touch

with you? You can sign up for Morning Brew newsletters at morning brew dot com and you can follow me on Twitter at Austin underscore reef r E. First you'll go and sign up for all the Bruise products where Austin just said morning brew dot com. Then you'll listen one of those products is Founders Journal. Would love for you to listen. And then on Twitter on business Barista. Awesome, you guys, Thank you so much, Thank you so much, and please come back and visit. We will. Thank you.

Thanks so much for having us guys. Thank you again to Alex and Austin for coming by. Great conversation. Going back to what we were talking about at the kind of beginning of the show, it really codified my thinking and some of the things that we used to do together where we would have conversations with c r o s at big media companies, but we would be asking and pushing on what I P do you have? This was what what's your I P? What's your most valuable

I P? Talent, etcetera, technology, etcetera. And what happened because we were asking those questions, we stopped having conversations just with the sales teams. We started having conversations with the founders, CEOs and the chief product officers and maybe more importantly, the chief product officers, so really the people who were driving the technology, thinking about audiences and developing products in

media for audiences. And that completely changes the conversation that you have on the brand partner side if you're actually starting to develop with developed products, think about audiences with a chief product officer at a media company. And I think that there are actually still few chief product officers titled kind of quote unquote properly, but I believe we're going to see a lot more, a lot more chief

product officers entering entering into the world of media. You know, it's interesting if you go back in the episode the transition from newsletter to podcast, because there was an intimate relationship that existed with an obsessive audience. That pairing of the commercial side coupled with the content side when you're picking up the signals, insights, inputs from audience pits on um what what you're noting around bringing product officers forward

with revenue officers and having those conversations with marketers. How can advertisers be a part of it and build not just media product, but add product around it and and in that intimate relationship with obsessive audience. Note it does not look like impressions. It does not look like clicks. It looks like conversations. It looks like how many sweatshirts I sold last quarter to people who are engaged with

my community? And so could you imagine lex and we've sat down in many of these conversations with publishers, c ros and sales teams. If that pitch deck started with X media company we sold ex sweatshirts with our logo on it last quarter, versus we reached X audience, could you imagine the conversation that that would have started for us? And just what's happening there? Tell us about that? Yeah? I think it just signals something different, which is the

participation factor. And in that participation factor, new ad products and monetization models should emerge. Two things. They're one, I think that we too easily equate scale with volume like that, so on the nose direct impressions, giant audiences, you can scale, and in fact, brands are doing it all the time, scaling with niche audiences and Austin. Austin talked about that. He was like, and I kind of pushed him, so he hit home the point that niche and scale are

not mutually exclusive in fact they work together. And so when you start to think about that, are we even defining scale the right way? Do we have the right tools to really think about and design for scale visa V niche? And then too that participation factor, how do we allow and invite the audience to own part of

the experience because that is where the fire happens. That point is really interesting when you think about how much time, attention, engagement, money is left on the table when you go vertical versus building horizontally, and so you can scale that niche by moving into and diversifying your product portfolio, as we heard the Brew intends to do. I think it's a

really interesting inflection point for media company. He's in thinking about ted Lasso included how I moved from form and function to franchise and thinking about the newsletter or a streaming show which now has the ability to move into and engage with community in new ways that widely opens up the aperture for business totally. And with that, Atlantia, we'll be back in two weeks. Laura hit it with a list of all of our friends and family at my Heart who have been so good to us and

helped us get back on air. Big thank you to Bob Connal, Carter, Andy, Eric Gayle Val, Michael jen We appreciate you. Thank you so much for this opportunity. We'll see you in two weeks. So, Ryan, what Ted Lasso character are you? I really wish I was Roy Kent, but I am, in fact a Nate through and through, and I hope that is uh his oar goes where I think it's going, where he'll have a bit of redemption from being a little bit of a jerk this season totally. But he's not a jerk, and you're not

a jerk. He's like a secret killer. He's a secret killer. Yeah, you don't see you don't see him coming, and then he'll just drop some some knowledge bombs. Ryan, if you have to cast Alexa and I, who oh my gosh, Well, well Laura has to be. It's it's a tough toss up because I know you probably both want to be the key Ley. But I feel like I feel like Laura's kind of the KEI ly in in this vibe as an occasional mix of Roy, a little bit of Roy.

I think there's a little Roy Kent, a little Roy Kent. Yeah, I think Laura will be are Roy. That's a good call, all right, Ryan, who am I? Who am I? I have to go with with the boss lady, with the team owner. I feel like just honest and like doing weird investigative. I think that you're you're definitely the leader that surprises, that's very much in touch with the team and uh and knows the way to go. Nate, you just got promoted. Nate, you just got promoted assistant coach.

You definitely our assistant coach.