Ryan Duffy is the Founding Editor of Payload Space, a digital media outfit covering the business and policy of space. Previously, he worked at Morning Brew where he launched their second product, Emerging Tech Brew. Over three years Ryan was at the Brew, the newsletter grew to a subscriber base of 300,000+, all while maintaining industry-leading open rates. 


We talk about getting detained by the UN in Haiti, time at Morning Brew, scaling Emerging Tech Brew from 0 to 300K readers and  a lot of space meta trends.  






CONNECT 


Prashant Bagga: https://linktr.ee/prashantpbagga

Billion Moonshots: https://linktr.ee/billionmoonshots 






GUEST LINKS 


Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ryandoofy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rfduffy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/duffydrones

Website: https://ryanduffy.xyz/

Payload Newsletter: https://payloadspace.com/ 






OUTLINE 


(0:00) Getting detained by the United Nations in Haiti 


(3:26) Not setting a predetermined path for yourself 


(8:34) Solo creator vs traditional media 


(11:21) Deciding to Write Full-time 


(17:13) Getting into Morning Brew with a Facebook Event description 


(20:15) Secret sauce(s) of Morning Brew 


(40:40) Pulling all-nighter for Russia-Ukraine war 


(45:13) Morning Brew vs The Hustle 


(46:34) Move to Payload Space 


(52:48) Inflated email open rates due to Apple's privacy change 


(55:35) Value for Space Industry & Government Military 


(1:01:01) Interviews with Rocket Scientists & Heads of Military 


(1:05:48) Drones & FAA certification 


(1:10:10) Tragedy of Orbital debri 


(1:19:43) 1969 Moon Landing 


(1:25:34) The Wild Launch Landscape 


(1:31:25) Business Models of Space 


(1:35:49) Space's PR problem 


(1:42:00) The best minds are thinking about how to make people click ads  


(1:45:54) Kids wanna be professional YouTuber over Astronaut 


(1:53:58) Hi Sean! 


(1:55:17) Lunar & Mars Exploration 


(2:04:11) How to break into Space Industry 






TOP EPISODES     


71: Danielle Strachman, Founder & General Partner of 1517 Fund 


68: Natalie Brunell on Everything Bitcoin 


62: Suumit Shah, CEO of Dukaan  


45: Suhas Motwani, Founder of The Product Folks 


10: Aryaman Maheshwari, Software Engineer at Google (Hindi) 


2: Shanaya Bagga (my lil sis)  




Past guests of Billion Moonshots include Suumit Shah, Natalie Brunell, Danielle Strachman, Chirag Taneja, Suhas Motwani, Aditya Mohanty, Jan-Philipp Peters, Mo Islam, Peer Richelsen, Justin Nguyen, Paul Griffiths, Gautam Gupta, Sang Le, Rahul Rana, Grace Ling, Joseph Choi and many more.

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