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Austin Rief ☕️ Profile picture
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30 Dec 20, 6 tweets, 2 min read
1/ One of my 2020 New Year's resolutions was to share more about what I've learned.

I've written dozens of threads on everything from hiring to paid acquisition.

Here are a few of my favorite 2020 threads. Enjoy!
2/ How @MorningBrew got its first 10k subscribers.

3/ How I think about my schedule

4/ The best cold outreach I've ever received

5/ Morning Brew began because of a fortune cookie

6/ How @MorningBrew got to 1 million subscribers

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More from @austin_rief

Austin Rief ☕️ Profile picture
28 Dec 20
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.
Read 16 tweets
Austin Rief ☕️ Profile picture
16 Dec 20
1/ In the early days of @morningbrew, we launched a college ambassador program.

This "Brew-bassador program" was the main catalyst in our early growth to 100k subscribers.

Here is how we ran it and what we learned.

[thread]
2/ As I said in this thread, the program started organically.

@businessbarista and I went from class to class at Michigan pitching @morningbrew.

We'd pitch the Brew, pass around a piece of paper, and people would give us their email.

Pretty simple.

3/ This was very effective.

We had thousands of University of Michigan students reading within months.

We thought that if we could scale this to other colleges, it could be a huge growth driver.
Read 15 tweets
Austin Rief ☕️ Profile picture
12 Dec 20
1/ I often get asked how @MorningBrew got its first 10k subscribers. So, I’m just going to share some thoughts here:

[thread]
2/ I joined @businessbarista in 2014 to transform a PDF attachment with 250 readers into a media business.

We had 0 money to spend on marketing, so we had to get creative.

We had to (quote @paulg) do things that don't scale.
3/ We were students at the University of Michigan at the time, and knew many business lectures had 400+ students.

We spent weeks asking professors if we could speak in their econ/accounting/finance 101 classes.
Read 13 tweets
Austin Rief ☕️ Profile picture
29 Nov 20
1/ I have spent the last few months reworking my schedule to spend my time more intentionally.

With a little bit of trial and error, I have come across a few tactics that have helped me spend my work days more effectively.

(thread)
2/ "No meeting Mondays".

Having no meetings on Mondays allows me to spend the full day on my deepest work for the week.

I tend to get more done on Mondays than the rest of the week combined.

Accomplishing the most important tasks of the week keeps stress levels low.
3/ No morning meetings.

I set aside time each morning for 4 things:

- Reading
- Thinking
- Putting out the fires that inevitably arise
- Planning for the rest of the day.
Read 7 tweets
Austin Rief ☕️ Profile picture
21 Nov 20
I am still stunned by founder dilution in capital intensive startups.

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu owns only 4.4% of the business.
H/t @EricNewcomer
Stop commenting: “it’s still a lot of money”.

I KNOW. I CAN MULTIPLY 2 NUMBERS TOGETHER.

That. Isn’t. The. Point.
Read 4 tweets
Austin Rief ☕️ Profile picture
28 Oct 20
Last week I got the best cold outreach message I've ever received.

It led to a job interview in 72 hours.

Here's the story (thread)
2/ Last Tuesday I got a DM, which led to this viral tweet.

3/ That tweet lead to him writing this newsletter in less than 8 hours... by himself! Super impressive just to be able to create this in 8 hours. And it was good!

drive.google.com/file/d/1iYiLus…
Read 7 tweets

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