Alex Lieberman was a University of Michigan senior with a job waiting for him at Morgan Stanley already lined up when he started working on Morning Brew in 2014. He was irritated by a seemingly irreconcilable fact: His peers hated reading the Wall Street Journal but still needed to understand business news. So he started clipping the paper himself, summarizing the day’s headlines into a PDF newsletter, and emailing it to anyone who would read it. 45 people: Friends. Family. Coworkers. Whoever.
That is the entire origin story of what would grow into Morning Brew. Not a viral social media post. Not a Stanford start-up. Not a cool ad campaign. A list. Of 45 email addresses, according to an incredible tale of the company’s beginnings from The Zero to One newsletter.
Lieberman and Brew co-founder Austin Rief picked up their first 300 subscribers by “taking out flyers and talking at business classes and clubs,” per Zero to One. Four months in, Brew had 1,000 subscribers. Referrals powered the newsletter’s growth from there: Roughly 30% of Morning Brew subscribers today join through referrals.
Today the company
Today, the company has over 2.5 million readers in an era where reading the newsletter feels like a lost art preserved for suit-wearing, dark-coffee-drinking finance professionals. Business Insider paid founder Alex Lieberman a majority stake in Morning Brew for just under $75 million in February of 2020.
Here’s the thesis I’ll walk you through today: If you’re building anything these days, whether it's a club newsletter, a side hustle, an investment portfolio, or a personal brand, your email list is more valuable than your follower count. Not equally valuable. More valuable.
Imagine you spent years crafting the perfect Instagram post. Stunning photo. Insane value. Captivating caption. And then you watch it get seen by … 35 people.
If you have 1,000 followers on Instagram, that’s likely the total reach of a regular post in 2025. On Facebook, the average brand’s organic post reaches anywhere from 1.65% to 2.2% of its followers, according to Ignite Social Media and Social Plus’ analyses of Facebook and Instagram organic reach.
Social reach has been eroding for years as both Facebook (Instagram’s owner) and TikTok actively and quietly cap how far your content will spread. Algorithms decide which of your friends see your content, and then they double down on showing the same subset of people more of your posts. Two minutes on TikTok explained it better than I can:
Social media posts live on borrowed time.
At any moment, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok (et al) can quietly reduce how far your content will reach. It happened to Facebook News Feed posts in 2016. It’s happening to Instagram Reels right now.
Email doesn’t work that way.
Email marketing has the highest return-on-investment of any marketing channel, period. Email returns $36 to $42 earned for every $1 spent. Retail and e-commerce brands return $45, on average. Social media ads return $2.50 to $3. Those numbers all come from industry research published by email marketing platform Litmus.
Subscribers opt into your email list. Their emails never leave their inbox. When your mom deletes an email by accident, Mailchimp doesn’t delete her from your database. (Not without charging you $100 first, at least.)
There’s no logarithmic wall for how big your email list can get. Hell, one of my Mailchimp students just hit 100,000 subscribers last month.
Email open rates average around 46% to 50%. That’s dramatically higher than the 2% to 4% of followers who’ll see your average Instagram post no matter how diligent you are about posting.
If you take one piece of advice from this article, make sure it’s this: You own your email list. Your social followings live on platforms you didn’t build, at the mercy of algorithms you’ll never understand.
How do you build a list?
It all starts with your first subscriber. Your 45th. Your 1,000th.
Starting from zero seems impossible. Here’s how to actually do it:
Accept that your launch will suck. Go launch anyway. Seriously. Start younger than you’re comfortable with. Brew’s offering wasn’t quite ...there when he hit his first 300 subscribers. Neither was Newsletters’ when we started in 2017.
Turn off your inner editor and build something. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But it does have to exist outside of your laptop.
“Good” is the enemy of great.
Promise value, then overdeliver. Would you sign up for an email if all it said was, “Sign up for our newsletter!”?
Probably not.
“Sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive event invites!”
Better, but not specific enough. How exclusive are the events? How often will you send? Will they be boring?
“Sign up for our newsletter to get access to one free business event every quarter.” That’s far more specific. Now imagine how good that email will look after delivering on the first freebie.
Eric Wu gave away thousands of dollars’ worth of camera equipment to his first email subscribers for Snapworld. I’ll never forget his advice when I was the recipient of that newsletter: Always give more than you promise.
While you’re at it, stop saying “follow.” It’s not actionable. When was the last time you Googled “how to follow X?”’Instead of “follow us on Instagram,” try “swipe up to learn three wildcard hotkeys that’ll make you a master of Gmail.” Actionable. Specific. Explain why someone should submit their email with one sentence.
Meet Lieberman and Rief were meeting their first subscribers in real life.
You’re handing over your email. That’s a vulnerable exchange of information. Most people won’t enter that into a website unless they know who you are and trust you not to overload their inbox.
Go talk to people IRL.
If you must collect emails online, grab a Google Form and paste it into your bio. Tell people you’ll email them directly once. Verify their addresses with a double opt-in. When you’ve got five solid subscribers, buy the cheapest Mailchimp plan you can find. Move those five emails into Mailchimp. Build from there.
Email yourself a shareable link that auto-fills your form. That way, when you hand your phone to someone who wants to subscribe, all they have to do is enter their name and press go. Here’s an example from Newsletters.
If you do this in person, bnonus points if you track how many new subscribers came from each person who refers. My newsletter’s top subscribers each brought in at least 50% of all our readers. One brought us more than 150.
You’re not just building a list. You’re growing a community.
Does your email footer have an option to forward your newsletter to a friend?
Good. Make sure it’s as easy to click as possible.
Morning Brew didn’t build a referral program until they had tens of thousands of subscribers. They still get 30% of subscribers from people who tell a friend about the newsletter.
Eliminate barriers.
Your newsletter will have a painful unsubscribe rate at first. Make it painless for people to unsubscribe if they want.
Again: Own your subscribers.
Pay attention to the number that matters. Your real, engaged subscriber count.
Every social number is meaningless.
Here’s why:
Likes are easy to manufacture. Most venture capitalists won’t look at a social media profile anymore unless it’s blue-checked. Instagram Stories averages 15% views. Spend enough money, and you can guarantee a post at least gets seen by 1% of your followers.
Meanwhile, your subscribers have opted in to hear from you. That means they want to hear from you! Sure, some will unsubscribe. But once you build a product your readers love, your unsubscribe rate will decrease faster than your list will grow.
Say it with me: You own your subscribers.
If you're interested in continuing to build your own subscriber list, Email Marketing for Newsletterers goes into detail on how to start from scratch, expand your list, and make money from your email list. It'll be relevant whether Substack is HOT or NOT. Sign up below!
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