Thread by @austin_rief

1/ When @morningbrew began spending money on paid acquisition in 2018, 2 small insights exploded our growth ~10x in a year.

Small insights can have a huge impact.

Here is what we learned.

2/ The first insight was that the best way to grow a specific medium was to get promoted on that medium.

If you are a podcast, cross-promote with podcasts.

If you are a newsletter, cross-promote with other newsletters.

3/ We found that readers we acquired from ads in other newsletters were >2x as engaged as readers we got from Facebook or referrals.

Noticing this, we bought ads in every newsletter that would let us.

These ads were incredible effective in acquiring quality readers.

4/ On top of the quality, in 2018 the newsletter monetization market was nascent.

Everyone was underpricing their ads.

We were able to buy ads at a 50-75% discount than what was charged a year later.

As a bootstrapped business, this was great.

5/ When we began to exhaust the newsletters we sponsored, we needed to figure out a way to find more.

A bunch of other companies had large email lists, but had no clue how to monetize them.

They didn't even know how to create or sell an ad.

6/ We helped these businesses build out their ad department.

In exchange, we received inventory in their newsletters.

This opened up millions of newsletter impressions for us as the first advertiser.

7/ The second insight was due to 2 simultaneous events.

First, we posted this Instagram on our feed and it blew up. It was our best performing Instagram post by far.

For whatever reason, this humor landed.

8/ Next, we had heard that Instagram was ramping up Instagram story ads. This was very early for IG stories.

We always like to be first to test out a platform, and so we brainstormed what our first IG story ad be.

9/ We thought, why not try to use the humor of the fake conversation with the Instagram story ad format. .

Combining these 2 ideas, we launched our first ever IG story ad.

10/ Performance was insane.

We couldn't spend money fast enough.

We had never spent more than a few thousand dollars a day on FB, and didn't realize that we had a $10k daily cap on our ad spend.

We were now hitting that by noon.

11/ We were getting subscribers for 10 cents each.

We were refreshing ads manager every 15 minutes and the subscribers just kept coming.

While those crazy numbers only lasted a week, it changed the trajectory of @morningbrew growth forever.

12/ A few takeaways from these breakthroughs:

First, experiment. I thought advertising in other newsletters was a terrible idea... until we tried it out and the numbers blew me away

You never know what is going to work. So start small, test & double (or 10x) down on what works

13/ The second takeaway is that it's always worth testing an early ad product.

They don't always work, but when they do, it can be an absolutely massive opportunity like IG story ads were for us.

Being early on IG changed the trajectory of @morningbrew.

14/ For more threads on the early days of growing a business, check out this meta-thread and follow me.

I try to post one new thread weekly.

https://twitter.com/austin_rief/status/1339411082063060992?s=20

Pretty overwhelmed by the response here. So many awesome messages and DMs about this thread.

Keep the messages coming. Will get back to the rest tomorrow!