Morning Brew's Co-Founder on The Three Channels That Will Win 2025 (Plus, How to Craft a Voice That Stands Out)

All I have to show from my college days is a questionably long Facebook album titled “For the Nights I’ll Never Remember, and the People I’ll Never Forget.”
Meanwhile, when Alex Lieberman was in college, he launched a newsletter now valued at $75M.
It’s okay… We all have our strengths.
MEET THE MASTER
Name: Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew; co-founder of Storyarb
Claim to fame: Launching a newsletter now worth $75M — from his college dorm room
Lesson 1: When launching a biz, embrace the ol’ hub-and-spoke model.
Lieberman had no clue he was following what he now calls the hub-and-spoke model while getting Morning Brew off the ground at University of Michigan.
But he most certainly was: He and his co-founder, Austin Rief, would visit business classes and clubs across campus and ask professors if they could speak to students. They’d launch into a quick 30-second pitch about Morning Brew, collect emails, and voilà — a cumbersome, on-the-ground list-building strategy was born.
So why’s it called hub and spoke? For Lieberman, the spokes are your ideal customers; the hubs are channels that give you access to lots of spokes at once. In his case, the spokes were business students, and the hubs were classrooms.
When they ran out of Michigan classrooms to bombard, they launched an ambassador program with 250 college students nationwide to collect emails at other schools.
“That was how we grew our first 50,000 subscribers. And then finally we‘re like, ’Okay, this ambassador program worked… Now how do we turn everyone into an ambassador?‘ That’s why we created Morning Brew’s referral program, and as of today, roughly 450,000 subscribers have gotten at least one referral using their email address.”
Lieberman credits this hub-and-spoke approach for their early success. His advice: Start with the smallest, most localized hub, then expand one step outward while staying focused on the right channels for your audience.
Your business might not find its target consumer in college classrooms, but the point stands — Find unique, off-the-Instagram-path channels to grow your audience one spoke at a time.
Lesson 2: Go extremely specific when crafting your voice.
When Lieberman realized Morning Brew needed a consistent voice, he didn’t mess around with vague guidelines.
He literally picked an actual human being. “He’s a family friend of mine. His name’s Aaron Stoppelmann. He’s 32 years old, lives in Connecticut, and reverse commutes to the city.”
The Morning Brew team documented Aaron’s go-to cocktail, his TED Talk-watching habits, and why people enjoyed talking business with him: “He‘s deeply passionate about it and he knows a lot, but he doesn’t come off as a know-it-all or stuck up.”
After creating a hyper-specific voice based on Stoppelmann, Lieberman created a three-person content assembly line that included a completely made-up role called “voice editor.”
This position went to Grant, a business school student from Michigan’s improv troupe whose comedy background was perfect for injecting personality into dry business content.
“That’s how we would …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog