The story of Morning Brew: A 10 year lookback and a new name.
Change is brewing at the Brew. More specifically, a name change…
But first, I think it makes sense to share how we got here.
It started with a simple insight in college. People around Alex and I hated traditional business news. It’s dry. It’s dense. It’s boring.
So we started a side project to create a 5 minute newsletter that the people around us actually wanted to read.
It was 2015 and that little side project blew up.
Because what we quickly discovered was that it wasn’t just the 20 year olds that wanted it. It was everyone.
The CEO of the NASDAQ. The CEO of Time Warner Cable. NFL players. Everyone was reading.
We spent 3 years laser focused on writing, growing, and selling the best business newsletter on the planet. By the end of 2018, we hit 1m subscribers. And that brought us to our biggest decision yet.
Morning Brew was a great, highly profitable newsletter business. We debated either keeping it that way, or going big.
Staying newsletter-only sounded nice at first – we knew exactly what we were doing. But we spoke with our readers and they told us they wanted more Brew. We had earned something unique that, as it turns out, most media companies would lose over the next 5 years: trust.
And that trust turned into deep engagement. For our audience, it wasn't just about a daily email newsletter. It was about a voice and a point-of-view that deeply resonated with an entire generation of up-and-coming business leaders.
We quickly realized that our job was not just about delivering a newsletter. It was engaging an entire generation. In a media world of flyby scrolling audiences, ignorable banner ads, and fake engagement, our audience wanted to opt-in to newsletters, events, and podcasts.
So that’s what we gave them.
B2B Business
Our audience told us that they wanted all that Morning Brew provided, but in a way that made them better at their job. “I want Morning Brew for X” was the number one email response we got every day. And we got thousands of them.
We launched @MarketingBrew , @Retail_Brew , @HR_Brew , etc. to deliver on that promise. While Morning Brew went a mile wide and an inch deep, our professional pubs go an inch wide and a mile deep.
Our B2B division was an immediate hit. Today, it’s a $25m business that serves millions of professionals and thousands of advertising partners through newsletters, in-person events, virtual events, long-form content and more.
Multimedia
We started with email for practical reasons. I wish I could say that we did it because we had the foresight to know it would turn out to be the best medium to start with. But in reality, it was cheap and we were college students.
While email carried us for the first 5 years, we knew we had to expand. Our audience cared about money-related topics beyond just business news. Personal finance, investing, workplace culture, entrepreneurship, and more were top of mind for those early readers.
Over the last 5 years, we have expanded on almost all social platforms. We launched @goodworkmb, @maxinomics, @brewmarkets, @moneywithkatie , and more. This portfolio of creator-led brands allows our audience to dive deeper into areas they care about.
These brands have shifted our audience's consumption habits significantly.
But the thing I’m most proud of is Morning Brew Daily. Our audience had been asking us to launch a daily podcast for years. We hesitated because we knew it would be tough to deliver a 10 out of 10 daily audio product.
But in January of 2023 we launched our daily business podcast and it’s been a hit. It’s frequently the #1 downloaded business podcast in America and most importantly, our audience loves it.
Multimedia has been an absolute grind over the last 5 years, but I’m proud to say that it is now pacing to do well over $10m of revenue in 2025.
5 year lookback
About a year ago, I was at SXSW meeting with our biggest advertisers and most passionate fans. In talking with them, I realized that while we had built all this amazing content, very few of them knew it existed.
Everyone knew about the Morning Brew newsletter. And some people knew about 1 or 2 of the other brands we had built. But no one understood the full scope of our ecosystem.
And as I thought deeper and spoke with our team, an even more existential question came up: What is Morning Brew? Is it a newsletter? A brand? A house of brands?
We knew we had to do a better job of explaining to the world who we are, and everything that we do.
A new name
Which is why today I am excited to announce our new corporate name: Morning Brew Inc. (creative, I know). And more importantly, show you all our new corporate website: https://t.co/Tl3ZadgOar.
We spent months thinking about our corporate identity. Do we go the “Meta” route, and use something completely different?
We decided that we had built too much affinity for the Morning Brew name and brand to start fresh. But we did need something that differentiated the company name from our flagship franchise..
So if you’re keeping track at home:
Morning Brew Inc. = our company Name
Morning Brew = the name of our most popular brand
So that’s what we’ve been up to. Go check out our corporate site and the franchises above, and expect more content like this soon.
And to everyone that’s been a part of this incredible journey, thank you. What’s brought us this far has been our connection to the Morning Brew community, so keep letting us know how you want the Brewniverse to expand..