In 2014, Alex Lieberman was a senior at the University of Michigan with a job lined up at Morgan Stanley.

He had one problem: keeping up with business news was boring. The Wall Street Journal felt like homework. CNBC was for dads. Nothing was written for people his age.

So he started writing a PDF summary of business news and emailing it to his classmates. He called it "Market Corner."

Six years later, he sold it for $75 million.

The first version was embarrassing. Alex literally attached a PDF to an email and BCC'd everyone. No fancy platform. No design. Just a college kid summarizing the news in a way that didn't feel like a textbook.

People loved it.

His friend Austin Rief saw potential and joined him over winter break 2014. They spent weeks rebuilding it, gave it a real name — Morning Brew — and officially launched in March 2015.

The entire strategy: make business news feel like a friend explaining it to you over coffee.

By 2017, they had 100,000 subscribers. By 2019, over a million. By the time they sold, 2.5 million.

How?

1. They obsessed over one metric. Every day at 11am, they'd write their open rate on a whiteboard they called "The Great Wall of Opens." If people stopped reading, nothing else mattered.

2. They made sharing the product. Morning Brew's referral program let readers earn merch and perks for getting friends to subscribe. Word of mouth was the entire growth engine.

3. They stayed lean. For years, it was just Alex, Austin, and a couple of writers. They didn't raise much money — just $750K in 2017 — and stayed profitable from 2018 onward.

Most newsletters grow by buying ads. Morning Brew grew by turning readers into recruiters.

Here's how it worked: every subscriber got a unique referral link. Share it with friends, earn rewards. Get 3 friends to subscribe, unlock exclusive content. Get 5, get stickers. Get 100, get a hoodie.

Sounds simple. But the psychology was genius.

People didn't just share because they wanted free stuff. They shared because recommending Morning Brew made them look smart. "Hey, check out this newsletter I read" = "I'm the kind of person who stays informed." The referral program gave them an excuse to flex.

At its peak, referrals were driving 30%+ of all new subscribers. Free. No ad spend. Just readers recruiting other readers.

This is why Morning Brew was profitable while other media companies burned cash on Facebook ads. They built the growth engine into the product itself.

In October 2020, Insider Inc. (Business Insider's parent company) bought a majority stake for around $75 million.

That year, Morning Brew did $20 million in revenue and $6 million in profit. With a team of under 30 people.

Alex was 27. Austin was 26.

They kept running the company after the deal. Today, Morning Brew has over 4 million subscribers and does $70+ million in annual revenue.

Morning Brew didn't invent newsletters. They didn't have some revolutionary tech. They just took something boring — business news — and made it actually readable for young people.

The insight was simple: if you have to read this stuff anyway, it should at least be fun.

Alex and Austin executed that better than anyone. From a dorm room PDF to a $75 million exit in six years.