Austin Rief: Building & Selling The Morning Brew For Millions In 5 Years, Side Hustle Ideas, & More

My First Million

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways The first copy of Morning Brew (called “Market Corner” at the time) was a PDF attached to an email that was sent out to University of Michigan students In the early days, Austin and his co-founder Alex would print out the Morning Brew and The Hustle every day and compare them line by line to see which line was betterAustin splits up newsletters into three categories: editorial, aggregation, and then Morning Brew for X, and believes Morning Brew for X has the most potentialSome entrepreneurs are good at taking an idea from zero to one, and others are better at making private equity like improvements to a business “I think we may have broken a couple of laws to get our first couple thousand subscribers.” – Austin Rief Getting an early win in life, such as selling a company for $75M, opens up tons of doors and can pretty much get you in a room with anyone Austin Rief believes the part of Morning Brew that was not sold will eventually sell for multiples more than the first half that was sold“Becoming famous is awesome. Being famous is cool. And losing any fame is horrible.” – Will Smith  Wealth is all about having time, and spending your time how you want to Austin is a “vacuum” when he hires people with more experience than him; he tries to learn as much as possible from them in a short period of time to catch up to them 

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Episode 398: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk to Morning Brew CEO Austin Rief (@austin_rief) about building, growing and selling a newsletter valued at $75M in 5 years, discussing the question are newsletters still worth doing, and a few good side hustle ideas to start now.

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Links:

* Morning Brew

* Toptal

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Show Notes:

(01:00) - Morning Brew origin story

(19:10) - ad sales

(24:10) - Austin's strengths

(32:15) - Austin's upbringing

(42:55) - what did you do with your new found wealth?

(45:55) - ideas brainstorm

(01:13:14) - future plans

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Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.

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