✍️ Alex Lieberman’s 6-step newsletter-building machine

Our co-founder Alex Lieberman built Morning Brew into a $75M media company by doing something business media still struggles with: writing like a person.

The Brew’s humble beginnings started during his senior year at the University of Michigan, with a PDF newsletter, a listserv, and 0 media experience. (Also, 0 money, and 0 real plan to make it.)

But he had a hunch that the Wall Street Journal wasn’t written for his generation — it was written at them. And people liked his alternative. 

Within a semester, the entire Ross School of Business was subscribed. Within 5 years, Insider Inc. acquired a majority stake for $75M. By that point, Morning Brew had grown to 4 million subscribers.

(Which means we only have 3,993,000 subscribers to go until The Standard catches up to our cool newsletter cousins. Smash that “forward” button.)

This week, Alex breaks down the exact playbook he wishes he'd had when he started: your 6-step system for building a world-class company newsletter from scratch.

Let’s get into it.

Most newsletters don’t fail loudly. They just kinda … stop getting opened. And usually, it’s because they skipped the fundamentals.

Here’s where most teams get it wrong.

Start with your reader, not your content

Before you write a single word, your newsletter concept needs to pass 3 tests: 

• Does the niche you cover make someone better at their job, save them money, or genuinely entertain them? 

• Will the audience for this niche be bigger in 5 years? 

• And is there a real monetization opportunity here?

Alex calls it the Content Pyramid. The more endemic your potential advertisers and the larger your addressable audience, the stronger your business case. (Most newsletters skip this entirely, and wonder why no one's reading them.)

The team question nobody asks soon enough

Here's something Morning Brew learned the hard way: a newsletter is a 3-legged stool — content, growth, monetization — and every leg needs an owner.

That doesn’t mean you need a team of 5. It means you need to be honest about which role you’re actually playing at any given time.

You can start with 1 person wearing all 3 hats, but that only works if you’re clear on when you’re writing, when you’re growing, and when you’re selling.

Most company newsletters collapse because content is the only leg anyone actually tends to. Growth becomes an afterthought, so most newsletters never get big enough to matter. And monetization never gets off the ground.

What Alex actually learned from monetizing Morning Brew

This is the part most teams rush past — and the part that actually determines whether a newsletter becomes a revenue driver.

A few of his biggest takeaways:

• Start with direct response advertisers. They’re far more willing to take a chance on a newer newsletter, and they’ll tell you quickly if what you’ve built actually works.

• Big brand advertisers don’t show up early. Most aren’t interested until you’ve hit real scale. Think ~250K subscribers.

• The best-performing sponsorships don’t read like ads. They read like your newsletter. Which usually means the brand gives you talking points, then gets out of the way.

• Sponsorships are the fastest path to revenue. But premium content and community are what compound over time.

One thing most people aren’t told going in: Click-through rates will go down over time. It’s basically a Newtonian law. 

Your job isn’t to stop that from happening. It’s to slow it down with better audience focus, better creative, and rotating advertisers, so your readers don’t see the same brand every week. 

The playbook goes deeper on all of it, including a full glossary of every content module (intros, curation sections, thinkpieces, referral cards, evergreen content, sponsor placements) and how each one serves the reader. Get it here.

Campaigns that got us talking: 

An Allbirds exec and a generative AI model walk into a bar.

Bartender goes, “What’ll it be?”

The exec says, “Something lightweight, scalable, and sustainably sourced.”

The AI leans in: “I’ve got this — wool, eucalyptus, or scraped internet content?”

AI spotlight: Turns out the hardest thing for AI to learn isn’t writing. It’s using a computer.

Meta is now tracking employee clicks and keystrokes to fix that.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Latest and greatest from Emily Kramer and 100 B2B companies, 19 charts and graphs, and 90 data points per company. TL;DR: 

• Marketing is ~4% of headcount.

• Unless you sell to marketers. Then it’s 8%+.

• Most companies still don’t have a CMO.

“Fine” is a dangerous answer when it comes to work.

We’re hiring five roles at storyarb:

• Operations Specialist — We have the systems. You make them smarter.

• Senior Client Success Manager — Enterprise accounts, team mentorship, process-building.

• Client Success Manager — You own the relationship from kickoff to renewal.

• Content Strategist — You think in frameworks. Turn ideas into narratives people actually care about.

• Copywriter — You write clearly, with personality, at a high bar.

Fully remote (US only). Full-time.

If you’re ready for something better than fine, you know where to look.

"So you can focus on what matters most."
"Do more with less."
"Work smarter, not harder."

These lines feel like benefits. They're not. They're the shape of a benefit — hollow in the middle, applicable to literally any product on earth. Vague aspiration is a shrug in sentence form. 🤷

If your copy could appear on a competitor's website without changing a single word, it's not copy. It's a placeholder that never got filled in.

Name 👏 the 👏 thing. 👏

Most newsletters don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they skip steps.

You can’t grow before you build consistency, and you can’t monetize before you build trust.

Morning Brew taught us the order of operations matters: 

1. Obsess over your reader. 

2. Build the editorial machine. 

3. Then monetize.

In that order.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

"Fine" is a loaded word.

Sometimes it means high-quality. Refined. Exactly what you want.

Other times, it means what your partner says when they're very much not fine.

Context does the work. So if you're writing "fine" anywhere in your copy, make sure your reader knows which one you mean.