What Morning Brew can teach you about running a newsletter

14 lessons from Morning Brew’s rise to 4 millions subscribers

Morning Brew turned business news into a $75 million media empire by doing something most people thought was impossible: making finance fun to read before your first coffee.

Started in 2015 by two University of Michigan students, Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief, in their dorm room, the newsletter now reaches over 4 million subscribers and generates millions in annual revenue.

What first began as a side project called Market Corner has become the gold standard for modern newsletter publishing.

The Morning Brew formula

Morning Brew is a free daily newsletter that started by delivering business and tech news in under five minutes, though editions have lengthened over time. The target audience is people aged 25 to 40 who work in business or want to understand it better, people who want substance without the stuffiness.

Each edition opens with a short, witty comment from that day’s editors. Then you get the top stories, broken into digestible chunks with mini editorials initialled by the relevant editor. You’ll find gifs, memes, and humorous headlines scattered throughout (it’s extremely millennial, if you can picture that). It’s informal without being unprofessional.

The format itself is remarkably simple. Headline, image, body text, repeat. But that simplicity took years to refine.

Why Morning Brew works

Morning Brew solved a problem most business publications ignored: their readers were bored.

Traditional outlets assume that their audiences want dense, serious writing about the latest news. But Morning Brew bet on the opposite. Young professionals want to stay informed, but they also want to be engaged. And I can attest to that: if your business writing is jargon-heavy and dry, I’m not going to read it.

And from there, the newsletter fits seamlessly into any morning routine. Five minutes with a cup of coffee and you’re caught up. It creates a habit, and builds the newsletter into daily life.

But convenience isn’t what builds a $75 million company. Morning Brew’s skill was in understanding that boring topics don’t require boring writing. Finance and tech news can be funny. They proved it daily. Whatever you write about, it can be engaging — even if the topics don’t lend themselves to that initially.

The Brew team also nailed consistency. They appeared in inboxes every single morning, without exceptions. That reliability is what turned casual readers into engaged subscribers. When people know exactly when to expect you, they can build you into their routine.

Morning Brew maintained a 42% unique open rate while scaling from 500,000 to 2.5 million subscribers, a metric that would make even the most established newsletter operators envious. Business newsletters like this might expect an open rate of 15-25%, but Morning Brew went far beyond that.

The referral system

Word of mouth drove Morning Brew’s early growth, but the founders knew they would need something systematic to scale. So they built what is probably the most successful newsletter referral program ever created.​

The mechanics were straightforward. Readers who referred friends earned rewards at different thresholds. 3 referrals meant you got the premium Sunday edition, 5 meant stickers, 15 was a coffee mug and so on.

Morning Brew implemented double opt-in by 2019 (where new subscribers must click a confirmation link in an email to verify their subscription before being added to the list), ensuring only legitimate referrals counted. That means no gaming the system with fake emails. As a result, their conversion rate was extremely high.

Morning Brew revealed they worked meticulously on viral coefficient calculations. They understood network effects. Subscribers referred others, who referred even more people, creating compounding growth. At the program’s peak, more than 300,000 subscribers had gotten at least one referral.

Create something genuinely worth sharing, and readers will want to share it.

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No paywalls here!

Morning Brew has never charged readers a penny. Everything runs on advertising revenue.

The key was building an audience advertisers actually want to reach. Business-savvy millennials with disposable income and purchasing power. The average Morning Brew subscriber is in their late 20s or early 30s with jobs at least somewhat related to business. And specific audiences are a goldmine for advertising and sponsorship revenue.

By 2020, Morning Brew was generating over $20 million in revenue and $6 million in profit. They'd been profitable since 2018, a rarity among cash-burning media startups. That October, Business Insider’s parent company Insider Inc. acquired a majority stake in an all-cash deal that valued Morning Brew at approximately $75 million.​

The founders, both in their twenties, had raised only $750,000 in seed funding back in 2017. They turned that into an eight figure exit in three years.

Morning Brew also expanded aggressively into B2B verticals. They launched niche newsletters for specific professional audiences like CFOs, retail executives, and emerging tech specialists. These B2B newsletters command even higher advertising rates because the audiences are more targeted and valuable to advertisers.​

Subject line testing

Morning Brew tests subject lines obsessively. Every single morning. They’ve seen open rates vary drastically depending on which subject line wins, which at this scale means hundreds of thousands of additional readers opening that day’s edition.​

For loyal subscribers, the subject line barely matters. The Brew is already ingrained in their routine. But hundreds or thousands receive Morning Brew for the first time daily. For them, the subject line is important. The difference between opening or ignoring, between becoming an active subscriber or churning.​

Morning Brew’s data showed that getting a new subscriber to open even once in their first few weeks is crucial. If someone doesn’t open at all early on, they probably never will. By testing subject lines, Morning Brew maximizes both daily opens and new subscriber conversion.

Consistency of tone matters

When Morning Brew started launching additional newsletters beyond their flagship daily edition, they faced a challenge. How do you replicate a distinctive voice across different topics and writers?

Initially they tried to copy the exact tone of Morning Brew into every new publication, but it didn’t work. It’s not possible to force every writer to sound identical, especially when you’re covering wildly different subjects. After all, how do you make retail funny in the same way you make tech funny?​

Morning Brew’s solution was to create an umbrella tone. The guidelines are broad: be empathetic, don’t be condescending, don’t be super cheesy (which isn’t always easy for millennials — don’t hate me!).

Even within a small, independent newsletter, having a tone you can replicate is valuable for building an engaged audience.

So what can you actually steal?

Well, you’re unlikely to raise $750,000 in seed funding or sell your newsletter for tens of millions of dollars. Most people aren't writing in a space with that kind of potential, so you might think this doesn't apply.

But that's not true — you can still steal the principles that got them there.

Here are 14 lessons you can take from Morning Brew and apply to your newsletter.