Two growth insights from the founder of Morning Brew

Morning Brew is a very impressive newsletter business:

• 3 million subscribers total across 5 newsletters (4 business, 1 lifestyle)
• 2.5 million subscribers on their biggest newsletter
• made over $20 million in revenue in 2020
• $6 million of that is profit
• 2 founders and about 60 employees

Austin, one of the co-founders, is one of my favorite follows on Twitter, because he likes to share numbers and learnings. (Lots of people with newsletters like to share numbers, actually.)

Same, Meet Same 👯‍♀️

Yesterday, Austin had a really good thread about two insights that helped them grow 10x in a single year.

Here's the first:

If you're building an X, find users from other X's. Simple.

Lots of people I've had on the Indie Hackers podcast have noticed this. For example, while running his growth agency, @Julian learned the secret to doing well on Kickstarter is to advertise to an audience of people who've bought on Kickstarter before.

This is also why you often see similar restaurants near each other. Would you rather build your coffee shop across the street from another coffee shop, or across the street from a clothing store? It's unintuitive, but I'd pick coffee shop, because I want to reach people who obviously love coffee.

I'm early! Now what? 🐥

There's also a hidden insight in Austin's followup tweets:

Just because you're early to a market doesn't mean you win. We can all name a handful of first movers who got crushed by the competition.

You need a playbook for how to take advantage of being early. Austin's was:

1. Recognize you're early, otherwise you won't take action. This is surprisingly hard to do. We can see the past but not the future, so we often assume we're late because "look at all the companies already doing this!" But you know you're early when there aren't a ton of people selling you books about how they made it big doing what you're trying to do. I'm only half joking. 😝
2. Dive into competitive marketing channels. Usually this would be horrible advice. But being early means less competition means competitive channels are as good as they'll get. Think advertising, SEO, app stores — anything where there's limited real estate people are competing for.
3. Create the channels you want to see in the world. That looks like reaching out and educating people with big audiences. For example, the first to do influencer marketing had to pitch influencers on this new idea they'd never heard of.

I occasionally send out this newsletter with my thoughts on indie hacking. Subscribe to get new posts in your inbox. —Courtland

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The most valuable things I'm learning, shared with you. By @csallen.

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Notes on Moats 🏝

There's a fourth item I'd add to the "be early" playbook, which is to build moats.

You will have copycats. Moats make it easy to ignore them.

• For indie hackers, the easiest moat is often network effects. Make it so every additional customer improves the quality of your product for other customers. Communities are a simple way to do this.
• Branding can be a solid moat, too. It means capturing mindshare through a stellar reputation. Mindshare is hard to unseat. One thing you can do when you're early is to coin, popularize, and own new terms. (e.g. me and "indie hackers," Li Jin and "passion economy," etc.) It's also important to be unique if you're going for branding as a moat. Avoid building on platforms that commoditize you. There's no point in building a brand that's not memorable, and you can't be memorable if others are indistinguishable.

Most other moats are a waste of time for indie hackers. You aren't Google. You're not going to build tech nobody else can replicate. The best you can do is move fast and be good. That discourages most intelligent would-be copycats, and the unintelligent ones aren't worth worrying about.

Read the news. Seriously. 🗞

I'm big on news. You should be, too.

It's called the news because it's the best place to find out what's new. Finding out what's new is how you uncover opportunities. And proactively uncovering opportunities is how you make your own luck. Waiting around for opportunities to fall into your lap is how you stay unlucky.

For example, here's one instance of luck:

I doubt Austin just happened to hear about the release of Instagram ads. No, he was on the look out. He was constantly experimenting. It would be more accurate to say that nobody could've stopped him from learning about Instagram ads. It was inevitable. Morning Brew was on a mission.

I've met lots of people like this. When I first launched Indie Hackers, some intrepid founders pitched me to advertise their product on my brand new website. I think they paid me $800.

I'll be honest: I don't know what happened to them. Their ads kind of flopped. My bad. But such is the nature of experimentation: you win some, you lose some. Here's what it looks like when you win:

You don't have to be crazy insightful to do what Morning Brew did here. You just have to keep your ear to the ground.

Thanks for reading!

I occasionally send out this newsletter with my thoughts on indie hacking. Subscribe to get new posts in your inbox.

The Court Report

The most valuable things I'm learning, shared with you. By @csallen.

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