The Step-by-Step Playbook We Used to Build a $100M+ Newsletter Business

i still think the big between the media space i wanna take a big swing so someone i wants to go build a billion dollar company it's i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never wait it's so say what were you saying earlier how you hated me oh no you didn't hate me no i didn't hate you like i hated you just to be clear i hated you i did not hate you like i i feel like also part of like my stick has always been like whatever i don't hate anyone i try to kill people with kindness i i try like people have to feel like douche bags for hating me because there's no way to hate me like i feel like that was my for a while but i remember yeah i remember being on the fo with tim shah and he was investor in the hustle also right yeah i was so mad at him for investing in both of our companies i was so angry yeah and i remember being on the phone with him and i was like we're talking about you for some reason and i was like yeah like i i would love to talk to sam but i don't know if he wants to talk to me or ross and and tim was just like yeah i don't think he likes you guys very much and nope but anyway i didn't i didn't hate you but i i was jealous of certain things at the hustle and one of the things i was most jealous of was the welcome email like i remember reading the welcome email and being like this is so freaking good and i'm so angry that we don't have one that is as good as this i would have traded you the welcome email for your guys ability to be like financially like just you guys are far more than competent but i was barely competent so i i so like the envy went both ways alright so here's what i wanna do for this show so here's the deal so we do guys say what you sold for is that public or not we yeah because i set seventy five million i think is the the the public number so collectively the hustle in morning brew we sold for like hundreds of millions of dollars and i we were sort of like the graduating class of two thousand twenty or whatever we were the early people in the newsletter game we didn't like invent it but we kinda helped pioneer a little bit of what is popular today and now officially as of a couple weeks ago we are both are all three of us are officially out of our companies i've been out for a minute alex has been out for a minute now austin is out and we could finally reveal like a bunch of information and sorry sam to be clear i'm technically executive chairman so i'm no longer day to day but i am executive chairman of morning bro you are no longer operating but i think you guys do you still have equity ownership no we're we're up alright so that's what i mean and so what i wanted to do was i wanted to go year by year when we each started and i wanted explain to the listener what we were doing in that year what our revenue and profit was what our subscriber growth was things we learned and also we have to add this things that we would do differently if it if we were starting again today and things that we wish we had done does that sound good yeah sounds good i'm also excited for it because at the time i didn't know any of your numbers so this like the first time i actually know your numbers as we were going through it i think i have like shared with austin like our my whole data room at this point the cool thing by having a data room is like you're supposed to have you know all the information that's easily accessible so you can like go back and look back yeah but this is this is the first time it's all been in one place we've piece nailed it but i think it'll be fun to side by side it so we you guys started in two thousand and fifteen what was the original premise and once against both in college yeah so i was a senior at michigan austin was a sophomore i mean both of us were kind of on the finance track the general premise and it's so funny because like we've told this story so many times about how it started i don't know if it's actually the truth it's just what i remember is the story but basically was i was helping students prep for job interviews i would ask kids during these mock interviews how do you keep up with the business world every single student would say i read the wall street journal but my but it's dry i can't get through the whole thing my parents told me i have to read it and so at some point i was like this is crazy these kids are about to spend their whole careers in business yet they don't have something that they enjoy reading so i started putting together the kind of og version of morning brew which was called market corner and it was a pdf that that had attached to an email lists of every day and austin was one of my readers can i tell you what i think the real story was because it's probably the same story as mine sure you saw the success of the sci and you just said i'm just gonna do this for finance people or in my case tech guys definitely possible yeah i i i think that's partly true i do think alex started the the pdf version like there were two there were two versions there was a market corner and then there was turning into morning brew the evolution of morning brew was totally inspired off of wow if if these two women in new york city could get millions of people i think maybe need a million people at the time of reading like why can't we do the sand there's a bunch of you know we at the time we thought dudes in in finance who wanted to read about the business world and did do you have any revenue in year one no no but which by the way i'll say was a huge advantage for us that i don't think you had with the hustle is austin and i were still in school so we basically had a year and a half to two years of like fake timeline where we didn't have to worry about bringing in revenue so in two thousand and fifteen i think i was twenty five it wasn't the hustle it was just an event called hustle con and that year i think it had made around four hundred thousand dollars in revenue and like two hundred thousand dollars in profit like it was like a good event but we and it was basically like a ted talk for entrepreneurs but i was so scrappy and i honestly regret it one of my biggest regrets in life is buying the supplies that i needed for that event at costco and returning the stuff that we didn't use and i didn't realize that you throw things away once like costco throws it away and it was like the most shame that i'd ever felt was like do it being that like cheap and and horrible and that was a was the hustle that profitable like when you did it that first year was it profitable yeah yeah because it was just me and then i and then i asked my buddy john to help and it was just us too and yeah it made up so like when we started in the year two thousand and fifteen or sorry so the next year in two thousand sixteen i started the hustle because i was like conferences suck i wanna create a a newsletter because i had saw the sci i read about thrill list on mixer g dot com and a bunch of other in like a bunch of other newsletter businesses and when when i started that business i had five hundred thousand dollars in my bank and it was all from conferences it's pretty wild i think we said is interesting about the math right i think at the time and we have a funny story we can tell now that we've held back for a while about john stein in our first interaction with him but so many people came to us and they would say like this is so stupid why are you doing this newsletter thing it makes no sense but alex and i would sit there every night and we go through a spreadsheet and it was the most basic spreadsheet of you know newsletter subscribers grow five or ten percent a month and cpm stay flat and over time you can get to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of revenue a month and i think it was really that simple i had the exact same spreadsheet i listened to every interview with ben lee and i'm like tell me what the cpm are and then i met with business insider of reporters and i said tell me how many people visit your tech part of your website il eighty million okay then yeah like you're giving me some numbers to to triangulate yeah and like at the time everyone list was spending millions of dollars putting video on facebook and you know i don't think we were actually that smart i just think the people were around us were really dumb i do think one of the big advantages you know they they say in a poker table if you look around and you can't find the sucker you're the sucker well i think we picked the industry with a lot of suckers there were a lot of people who started five or ten years before us and they just weren't smart they were doing the same thing that they did for ten years and you know even in twenty fifteen twenty seventeen we were like yep buzzfeed it just doesn't make sense it's not worth a billion dollars and for five years i think people didn't believe us and over time i think we we prove that our model while it seems silly it actually works it day worked and it made us a bunch of money alright so fast forward to two thousand and sixteen where are you guys at how many subscribers do you have what was your revenue in two thousand sixteen what's the business yeah so twenty sixteen was the year when at this point i'm working full time on wall street doing the brew in basically you know let's call seven pm to eleven pm every night falling asleep with my laptop on my lap where were you working i was at morgan stanley was that miserable yep yes it was my my entire life was like built up to that point because remember like my dad was a trader on wall street for twenty years my mom was like this is all i knew but it was horrible and going back to what austin was saying about just like they're not being a a lot of smart people in media i actually think the best thing we did is like i call like iq arbitrage where i was on a trading desk everyone was a phd in math i was the dumbest person on my desk like not even a shadow of a doubt and just by moving to media i became not of the dumbest person september of twenty sixteen i quit my job also is hilarious right before that i almost got fired from morgan stanley it's because they were worried i was insider trading through morning bruce newsletter so so they basically hr found out about morning brew which i was supposed to have permission to work on the guy who was supposed to give me permission and told me he would guy fired in a massive lay off at morgan stanley so i didn't get permission and they basically had me meet with morgan stanley lawyers two lit that were defending morgan stanley saying you can never tell anyone about this meeting but we are concerned that you are trying to make investment decisions and get private information using your newsletter so that was kinda like the last straw for me maybe me really not enjoy the job quit my job we raised a small round in twenty sixteen twenty sixteen is also the year when we talked to john stein as he was starting cheddar and john s is like a media executive did you guys see the facebook message yeah that he sent me yeah so this guy named john stein at the time i think i'm twenty six and i'm just like a guy in a shitty apartment trying to do this newsletter and john stein is the president or ceo of buzzfeed and he's about to start a new company called cheddar he was at buzzfeed then he went to daily mail north america that he was the ceo of he stepped down from daily mail and then he sent austin and i an email awesome what was the subject like what did the email say again yeah so it was from we had no idea who john stein was we didn't know the media industry and a an email from it it's like john stein some numbers at gmail dot com and he emails us intro is subject line intro to founders body of the email like what you're doing period that was the holy email so we let the guy have a linkedin and we're like holy shit this guy's a big deal you know we give him a call and i mean alex can tell the story better but he turns it he flips on us he makes us think he's excited us he's gonna he's gonna invest in us all this stuff and then he brings alex to his office and i'll let alex take it away what happens go ahead yeah so i i go to john's office which of the time was a tiny like closet of a we work space and it was him peter gore who is his c founder and the chief content officer and i get there and i think the conversation is gonna be about how john is gonna invest in morning brew or how morning brew maybe we'll have a segment on cheddar that would create you know audience and distribution for us instead he starts interviewing me yeah because he wanted you to work there yes so he started interviewing me he's like okay so fitbit earnings come out you need to get an expert on the story to talk about what this means who are you talking to how are you finding them let's go and i was like well i'm gonna find figure out a way to get to the ceo to do it yeah you think yeah and and i was and then at some point in the conversation i was like you know to be honest i'm you know i'm not interested in a job at cheddar like i thought we're gonna be talking about a partnership with morning brewer are you guys investing in us and i will never forget this line honestly i have some respect he said this because he wasn't wrong he goes to be totally honest the cost of the legal fees to do this deal will be more than i what i would pay for you guys and i was like damn he's right right now he's right down i have an very similar story first of all related to john i just found an message on facebook that i got here's his opening two lines have we met we shouldn't meet he he's a he's amazing he he he's there like over or five times and that guy's motor just runs like he is just unbelievable so this is we're in year two thousand and sixteen i get a email or maybe i called email ben lee who started the thing called thrill which became group nine like a billion dollar company and then he's one of the c cofounder of lee hipaa which is like one of the most preeminent vcs in new york we start talking and i think he's gonna buy the hustle right off the gate and i'm like hell yeah like five million dollars that's how much have right now already like he the offer is gonna happen and he breaks in the president of the company and it turns into an interview the exact same thing and i was like oh i thought you were gonna buy us he's like brother this is a newsletter this will never make more than like two million dollars a year and i was like well i don't know man like if you do the math he was like no like you should come and join us like you know we're we're a real company like if you wanna like make this work you have to join our company and i it forever that has been of chip on my shoulder and just think about like how valuable it was that we were all kind of like both had conviction and were like irrational confident in what we were doing because like you could see so many other scenarios where someone's like you know goo eyed by someone who's super successful and goes and joins their thing and it basically cuts all of the possible upside that you know we ended up experiencing with our businesses so this is alright so we're in the year two thousand sixteen the hustle launched on four twenty sixteen and so that year we did four hundred k revenue i think we had at the end of the year we had like a hundred thousand subscribers i had this strategy where was running these crazy blog posts and getting like five hundred thousand to a million people a month coming to our website and that's how we grew and i think of the four hundred k i think a hundred thousand was advertising revenue and i think it was four of us at the time where where were you guys so that's a that's amazing because in twenty sixteen we did our first ad deal it was on watch brand called emblem la heart i believe it was about a three thousand dollar deal for for three we to call them exposures or so not you'd we called an ad exposures it was three of us we had a writer who ironically we poached someone from bi i i think i i'm not kidding i think he made it like seventies like he barely made it at the company he quit because we want him to work more than a a nine to five but you know we did twenty five thousand that year you did four hundred thousand we were three of us that i was still in college the mine ours were events so wasn't in advertising which is way less like but you guys people let fill a hundred thousand of ads that's pretty good yeah we started advertising i believe in june and i looked up my first deal it was forty six hundred dollars i called email guy named chris martinez at wealth front so funny i that's the funny thing is it it kinda reminds me of like if you go to my linkedin and look at my dms from last ten years i've basically dm every human being that it has worked in growth marketing or media over the last ten years and i remember that named chris martinez because i probably emailed him twelve times over that year to try to get him to do a deal with us i don't know who chris is anymore haven't talked him but if you're listening thank you the things i would do differently from sixteen is we raised a little bit of funding i would not have done that i thought and and in fact i tried to raise way more money but no one invested which ended up being a blessing because i made a lot of money because i own the majority of the company but that's what i would do differently so if you're listening to this i if i were starting today i would not raise funding at all would you agree i think raising funding is all about your business needs right i certainly wouldn't have raised more money than we did but we did need the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars i actually specifically remember this is now fast forwarding twenty seventeen it was december like twenty seventh twenty seventeen and i didn't realize that payroll goes out early if it's if it's new year's eve because they don't do payroll and holidays and i had a check in my hand that was gonna make payroll and i had to sprint to jpmorgan because they were gonna close at five o'clock it was like four fifty five and you people say you were you were close to missing payroll i was literally too away for missing payroll so we didn't need every penny from a cash flow perspective because obviously media companies the accounts receivable and i mean you might you might need thirty sixty ninety or a hundred twenty days just to get paid so we did need the money but yeah for a media avenger i don't think you should raise these raise as little as humanly possible i will i will say there is one thing i would have done differently and like one big lesson from that period and the raise the first is we had twenty eight individual investors so we had twenty eight people who wrote checks from twenty five hundred dollars to a hundred thousand dollars saying if i was to do it again i would have way fewer i would also try to assess out if these people are going to be difficult because we'll fast forward at some point but there were some very difficult investors when we sold the business the second is time is a crazy thing in startups and you always think you can get more done in a shorter period of time and i remember we had a slide in our investor deck that showed our one year plan to investors and that slide looking back on it now took us nine years we tried everything in that slide and took us nine years to try everything and most of those things did not work but yeah it took nine years to do accomplish our one year plan alright so we're now we are in two thousand and seventeen do you remember we ended the year yeah i tell the story differently i tell the story that we went from one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand in subscribers i think i missed a year because i went back in two thousand seventeen we ended the year with two hundred and fifty thousand subscribers we had two point two million in revenue four hundred k was events one point eight was advertising and my big learning that year was hiring a sales team i did a i think i did the first year of ad sales and i was horrible at it i didn't realize how up tight you had to you had to be like buttoned up i didn't know i didn't understand this where would you guys at the end of two thousand seventeen yeah so seventeen was the year that we were both full time or i was only full time half of the year we ended at a hundred thousand subs we did three hundred thousand dollars of revenue we finally started taking a salary we were taking sixty k each but that was the first real year we hired our first we hired our tyler dan who now is the ceo of bi behind i'm sure everyone listening knows be behind that he was transformational for us what was his job everything did do you remember his do you remember his first title austin do you remember no gross growth engineer yeah yeah yeah i mean he did everything and and between him and then we had michael schwartz who also now works in behave who was our first writer and then we had he brought on neil fry who still works at morty root today he is i mean like look alex was the the visionary of the morning grew voice but i do think neil was really the the executor and took it to the next level neil is i think i spoke about on last time i was the podcast neil was huge for morning bro he he really did what alex and i couldn't do which was take this idea in our head and put it on paper every single day three hundred sixty five days a year for now ten plus years i also think neil is a great example of what we did well at the broom what you did wealth the hustle which is i think about our first three writing hires neil michael schwartz and then this woman nikki and all of them were non traditional hires like i think the the morning brew and hospital were really good at finding undiscovered talent and seeing a ceiling in them that other people didn't realize and it was the same thing for you like i remember we'll talk about it later but like i watched your writers like a hawk i could read a hustle story and new knew who wrote it without seeing a name attached to the story and and i knew their backgrounds and none of these people were what media companies would traditionally hire as talent dude i tried to recruit media people and they laughed at me like i emailed this one famous journalist and she said that's cute thank you like like i tried to and so the only people i could a afford and b convinced to do this stuff where like for example lindsey quinn what's a blogger at like a procurement startup or something or i i don't even remember like she was not a writer but she could write and wanted to write and you sell them on the dream of like wouldn't be fun if you could do this hobby all the time and make money from it and that's the only people we could convince to join it she was she was my writing hero the number of times in my career i've tried to poach her is very non zero yeah she was fantastic and this really fast boris of twenty eighteen but alex is kidding we knew every single writer you had we knew and alex in particular knew every single story who wrote them and and we would come to work every day end of twenty seventeen twenty eighteen we went for the first two to three hours print out morning brew print out ax axiom print out the hustle print out the sci and with a paper and pen and alex led the charge would go through every single story he'd circle what he'd like he'd out what he didn't like and look alex is the most likable person on the planet you now know this salem i'm sure a lot of listeners know how likable alex the only person on the planet i know who doesn't like alex is our first writer because alex would sit there and just you know cross out half the words he put in the newsletter and be like look lindsey quinn wrote this same story better than you did like be better and it i mean we were we were man we we were you know we lost our minds to the game we we we were crazy about this newsletter thing and for the record i didn't do that and that's a regret like now that i'm older and understand how cup company building works like i would i would like if if you told me you're were doing that i'd be like you guys are insane just have fun do it feels good but that does not like once you get past i don't know five million in revenue or something like that you you and that means you probably have some type of product market fit you get absolutely iterate your way to being like wonderful you know starting like you're at a b or a c plus you can get yourself an a plus through iteration and and honestly i think a lot of me being might man with the content came from like what austin had taught me along the way around standard setting and basically this the standard of your business is what you allow and so like if you allow suboptimal optimal content to be written that is the new standard you set like basically you're implicit by saying not saying anything to something you're implicitly saying that that is okay and to me that was my biggest fear is if i said okay to things that were not exceptional content that was the new standard of how were you guys during this area in two thousand eighteen i was twenty two twenty three right yeah and yeah i mean i'm what a year and a half older than you yes so you're twenty four yeah dude you guys were like i i'm i'm like what you guys are and when you were twenty two today i am now a twenty two year old austin and twenty two year old alex like i totally buy into everything you're saying back then i completely would have laughed at you and your way but is one hundred percent the right way like being it's crazy how mature you guys were at such a young age yeah when when we sat down at first to set our core values to and at the time i thought core values were fluffy now in hindsight i actually regret that we didn't you know write those in stone and keep those we we we messed around with them a bunch but two core values were really important was one have an ownership mentality act like you're an owner and if you own something you're gonna every day critique it you're gonna give it feedback you're gonna care a time you're gonna drive every single day to that and the second is under underdog mentality we came into work every day a group of mis fits a group of people who had no idea what they were doing in the media industry and we just act like an underdog it's march madness right now and you just see the the way these underdog show up to games they're loose right they don't have this weight on their shoulders and every day we came to work and we were like screw it we are gonna kick the shit out of all these legacy media companies who raised these live at c hundred million dollars of funding alex and i would would sit down it's like what could you possibly do with a hundred million dollars of funding and what they did is they burned it on fire and flush it down the toilet and added no value to their companies yeah i i i also i also just think it's like at the time austin and i like we just had such a fire and i think for austin similar to you sam like austin kind of creates like a an opponent in his head and that is enough to basically just create this like ins drive to win i think for me i actually have less of that but the thing that compensated at the time was like the two things it was like my my dad dying and feeling like i needed to provide for my family to and i told you this last time always saw each other in person sam like me being bullied from fifth grade to twelfth grade and feeling like i just wanted to prove that i was like worthy that was more than enough where i think even when the the brew is small austin and i had this like deep in our bones feeling that we were going to heap like the business would ultimately sell and it was just a matter of time that's what i have always admired about you guys was you have this really cool combination of optimism and pessimism where austin is like afraid all the time yet like is logical enough to be like i'm gonna do this this this and then like the likely outcomes are a b and c i did not feel that way i i was i was a scarcity mindset and so in two thousand eighteen you guys did three point one million in revenue you had ten employees and how many subscribers that you have so twenty eighteen we went from a hundred thousand to a million subscribers so in twenty eighteen i think we ended the year at five hundred thousand subscribers we had five point one million in revenue about a million was from advanced and i paid my we had a hundred sixty grand in profit and that was the first year that we spent on advertising i went and looked back so we got to like two hundred thousand organically and then we spent money on ads and i spent a million that year did you guys spend money on ads that year to get to a million subscribers we spent every penny we possibly could i would track daily cash flow to make sure that we had enough money and we put i mean twenty eighteen was the year for us that was the year that i mean there were days in twenty eighteen we were growing twenty thousand you know this we would do these macbook giveaways we would grow twenty five thousand twenty twenty twenty five thousand subscribers in a day so yes we spent every dollar we could possibly find and might only regret is we couldn't figure out a way to find more money to put more money into facebook ads if i remember by the end of that year we were spending like five hundred k a month on ads right yeah at least at least that's crazy i i was being i had such a poor mindset where i didn't look at it you guys because you had this finance background and also i think you are just more like this naturally anyway you had this mentality of like well i i will spend one dollar to make like if one dollar turns into one point one dollars i will spend every one dollar i have for me it was like eighty thousand a month that's astronomical it doesn't matter what the return is like you know what i be like like that that was a failure that that's an immature mindset i also feel like part of it was like austin and i were younger than you we also like you know at the time we were only making sixty k or i think we had upped salary that year to a hundred twenty k and i don't like i think part of maybe your mentality for the hustle was like this is kinda just like a cash flowing lifestyle business for me that i'm gonna just like i can continue to pull money out of the business as like the the vast majority owner of it i feel like austin and i at the time weren't thinking about monetizing it for ourselves in the same way yeah and sam i knew you thought that right because you know i had a deal in laying that whole thing just happened and we certainly didn't have someone in your slack but we would talk to all your former employees we would get every of information we possibly couldn't and i knew that you had a profit the threshold you're like i wanna profit this every month i said well that means sam taking us foot off the gas and joe sam taking off the gas i'm gonna do the opposite we're gonna is funny we did i didn't make a lot of profit i didn't actually make a lot of profit like we grew revenue like fifty percent most every year but like i did not so i yeah and i think that you were talking about values i wish i would've have so you know i think i think you guys matured earlier than i did i was still really immature and i didn't cod notify my values and i didn't cod notify the culture i started the company when i was twenty four twenty five and i i i think i evolved to where i am today when i was like thirty one you guys were kinda like thirty one year old sam when you were twenty one but had i done it over again and if you're listening i would cod notify either your values early on and stick to it also what a lot of people do is they buy ads because so back then this was only you know a handful of years ago back then it felt like buying ads was more like there weren't that many experts now to buy ads it's like commonplace like you you it's way more common and so people buy ads wait earlier for the products now and i actually think that's a huge mistake totally yeah i totally agree i mean that's the part of the story that we didn't talk about is like we didn't do paid acquisition until twenty seventeen really so twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen to get to a hundred thousand subscribers it was entirely organic growth so by the time we actually were paying for subscribers like we knew we had a great product we knew how long subscribers were staying we also knew how like work within scarcity of not having money but finding ways to grow regardless and i think that muscle if you skip over it is a really bad thing okay and all another thing that i learned that well i learned so i'll say it in two nineteen so in two thousand nineteen you guys did three point one million in revenue with three million in profit thirteen point one sorry thirteen point one million in revenue three million in profit a salary each of two fifty a team of twenty five we did about eight million in revenue which with six forty being from events we did profit of two hundred thousand but we did cash flow of one point six million and we had and i'll explain why so at that point i sorta to sort of switch the business to carrying about cash flow it's and i had subs of about one point two million and that year we launched this podcast on under the hustle name launched my first million this year in two thousand nineteen the thing i learned was that you know how like a lot of social media companies and they're like who cares about revenue who cares about profit just grow your users this was the year that i learned that to be true that if you know that you make a certain amount of revenue per advertising via advertising or subscription per user that's the only thing that matters is just getting more users and i wish i would have understood that a little bit earlier yeah i think what we learned this year was we started to see the plateau of not just newsletter growth but of the economics and newsletters morning brew got to a point where we start to ask ourselves how much could you make on a single newsletter i think it was eighteen dollars for us per subscriber right fifty cents a month for advertising maybe that that sounds right i don't know exactly yet we have five cents something like that i i i think that makes sense but what we learned was at some point and the answer end up being far far down the road but we we start to ask ourselves you know do we wanna be a single newsletter or or are we gonna get to a place of diminishing returns from pumping more and more money and we were spending this year we probably spent six million to seven million dollars on paid acquisition so we spent what you didn't revenue almost just pumping growth back in and we start to ask ourselves does this make sense and that's where we learn about industry dies and we started to really take the approach of weight our audience works in retail they work in marketing they work in as cfo or in finance what if we took that path if the cpm are higher you don't need to grow as fast it's not a race to the bottom it's more of an engagement play and so that's when we went into our industry verticals yeah and and what i would say is also that year i actually think of all the years in the business twenty nineteen was the most important year because that was the year when austin and i i can't remember what month it was but basically i would say austin i really never got in big arguments or fights in the history of the business but in that year was the year that i could tell austin was or a single day austin was most upset with me because basically what i remember is austin and i were still working in the business like we were in the freaking mud and all we could think about was like making sure the newsletter went out tomorrow making sure we were getting an ad deal for friday like we could not see a month or a quarter ahead of us that's a really stressful time yeah and i remember one day we're in we work i got a a message from austin on slack saying hey one of our investors who is this guy scott who created the snug and he has a bunch of other products he told austin because austin had asked him about like what are thing what are resources you have to like operationalize your business and run your business and he goes i use this book traction and you're gonna read it and you're gonna adopt in your business austin read it and he gets back to me he messaged me in slack and is like dude you need to read this book yesterday and this is what we're gonna do and i remember a day goes by and i did earn a few days went by and i didn't read the book an and awesome messages me and says did you read the book and i said no and he says it's something along the lines of i don't understand why you're not doing the thing that is the most important thing in our business right now and i could tell for the first time that like he was actually pissed at me so i went that day and i read the entire book i did not work i went to the the highest floor of our we work and just read the book and i think a few things happened one is traction was a game changer for our business i also think that really became the inflection point where austin really took over as ceo of the business in kind of not title but in action and like i think it was a transformational year for the company i read the book around the same era and it had the exact same impact on me and in fact on tuesday it's wednesday yesterday i hired an eos implement her and i met with him yesterday to implement it into hampton and so for those listening eos it's called entrepreneurs operating system it's a framework to run your company it's based off a book called traction that's so funny that we all came across this at the same time yeah i i'd love for you to do a full episode of my first million i think everyone what were you kinda do a post mortem them and talk about how you implemented it reveal as much as you could because we didn't hire implement i thought it was waste of of time and money totally worth it and that's my biggest regret is not hiring a an implement because i didn't wanna be the bad guy i didn't wanna be the bully you you basically spend that you could say i don't know probably thousand of three thousand dollars it's usually like the guy i talked to it's sixty grand a year wow which by the way which by the way is why it's an unbelievable business it's basically like a digital franchising business it's it's such a cool business yeah it's but it's worth it it's basically it's sixty hundred a years it's basically an executive coach slash organizer but it's so funny that it happens if you're running a company once you get to like the five to ten million mark that's where it's like alright what we are doing is mostly working at least good let's do more of it and how do i do more of it without killing myself and creating red and building a company in transition from going from a business to a company and that is where that book helped me a hundred understand yeah i kind of thought about it at the time as like first chapter of morning brew was newsletter as a hobby second chapter of morning brew was newsletter as a business and third chapter was like newsletter business meaning multiple newsletters and there was no way we're were gonna be able to do more than one newsletter unless we figured our shit out because we were two in the weeds how many subscribers did you guys have at the end of nineteen i'd say probably about two right highway away from one to two maybe from one to one point eight but again that year was defined as us maturing as a business so sam at the hustle where were you in terms of maturation you you you and you were doing more than we did you had events and you an ad business and you launch my first million like how was the business actually being run oh and i have to say we launched trends that year mh so trends was basically a three hundred dollar a year subscription where like i had this woman named julie and steph smith write a weekly email and then we had a facebook group where you could talk about like interesting companies that's why i we we started measuring cash flow because i learned the importance of building three hundred dollars upfront versus monthly so at that point in the company i just had so many like demons that i was still just getting out of and like when i learned about running a company at that era was that the issues that you have as a person transcend into like the company and i went i didn't have like you guys had each other each other as like right hand man and i didn't have that like at the company where i could like confess to someone to all the things i'm nervous about and so i ran the company using eos and i had brad adam ryan so brad did content adam did sales i think i had scott nixon who did growth and i and i think we had one person who did events so i couldn't remember and then i had steph smith who did trends so i had five people who reported to me and i was kinda of beginning to get a little checked out because i was so exhausted at this stage you know exhaustion kicks in or on year four or five and i was starting to get dead for running the company and i just did not care anymore like sean came to me wanting to launch m mfa and i was like that's stupid like i hated everything and i was like this is stupid but if you really wanna do it you you know we'll be the publisher so we own it but show me an episode and he sent me the episode and i was like fine we'll do it and like but there was no and i published it the next week there was no planning there was nothing and i really was immature for not doing planning not having longer term thinking and for exhausting myself out yeah one one thing i'll is i think in that year that you kind of felt like mentally toast and like a little lost like that that was the year that i felt the same way i think for different reasons the other thing that's i think just an interesting observation is like you you mentioned like austin and i had each other as right hand people as we're going through business and i think that's true to some degree but i also think austin and my relationship has evolved a lot over the years because i think we started the business so young that the way like when c found a company now and that come the level of direct communication and feedback to each other that i have with like even for story with my ceo it looks very different than the way that austin and i would give feedback to each other in the brew and it's not because like it's not for any other reason of then we didn't have the maturity to speak with like radical can and speak openly i think we were like afraid about cri critique each other giving feedback and so i actually think at least for me a lot of my growth honestly came through like things like therapy or like dealing with it on my own i it's funny i think austin and i as c cofounder today will look so different than us as c cofounder you know in twenty sixteen through twenty nineteen i will say for me i think my big match rate like i i'm matured a lot during the sale process we dealt with so much and so many different stakeholders and look alex and i are really lucky like we grew up with with nice families and we started this business and basically from day one everything took off like we had no hardship and the hardest part of running the business but professionally the hard way guy i the business was when we had the sale process and we had some investors who were pissed at us for selling too early the same investors who six months early were begging us to sell we had employees who felt as if they didn't own enough of the company and and what you learn is when it's when you sell a company there's a huge lump sum of money that's in a paper and when everyone sees that lump sum everyone starts thinking like how can i get mine how can i get my money sure i only own point two five percent this company but actually i kind of view myself as a c founder i can view myself as more than worth point five percent of this company and i think i took that very personally it was very urgent it was very hard for me and at the time i was i was a bull in a bull in a china shop right and i remember taking these calls and my my now wife was in the other room and i'm one the calls these people and my wife goes austin you're an asshole and i'm like what are you being just you're a total asshole and i'm like but i'm right and she goes you're totally right but you can be right and not be an asshole and i was like oh i thought i that's possible i i know you could like that that was that thing so i was the total asshole up until then and i think i've matured a little bit since then while you're still bowl in a china shop it in a great way the you know what i telling earlier was i would never wanna have an argument with you i don't wanna fight with you because you will win a lot of times because you're so smart and your you're you're just like intense and so let's go to the year two thousand twenty the year two thousand twenty is the years we both sold i think my deal technically closed in february of twenty one but that year you guys remember the first half of the year we so the first q one of two thousand twenty covid hit i'm sure well actually let's recap so two thousand twenty you did twenty million in revenue six million in profit we did twelve million in revenue and i forgot how much profit we did but we had about three million in cash and we had one point five million subs i think you had three and the beginning of that quarter or q one we were probably in the same spot we i thought we are going out of business covid hit we thought i thought it was over did do you think that yeah i mean i it's very interesting like i can remember with these big moments like exactly where i was pacing in a room talking to us and like i literally remember pacing back and forth in my now in law's main room talking to austin we were talking about one of our biggest sponsors who is a financial services company that i can't remember the exact number but let's just say it was like they had an seventy five thousand dollar sponsorship coming the next day and the day before as covid was starting they canceled it so right seventy five thousand dollars gone in one conversation and then basically the flood gates opened and i came remember the exact amount let's just call it like in a period of a few weeks thirty percent of all revenue that we had booked vanished and i remember austin and i going back and forth being like how the hell are we going to make enough money to just not fire people i remember the first lever we pulled is we basically turned paid acquisition paid marketing down to zero but him and i literally like we brainstorm everything from starting a patreon and asking people to donate all the way to our education business like we ended up launching an education business at the brew which we've sent shutter but the reason that started was to bring in short term cash and that first education thing was a partnership with scott gallo when he was starting section for his section four we did the same thing we did a an a like a course and it made three hundred thousand dollars in one month then it help helps save us and that was the year that i learned with the word force majority and it it was crazy i i i thought we're going on a business and i remember you guys had just signed like a eighty thousand dollar a month like office lease and i was like yeah i hope this breaks down i hope this is there downfall and i remember during this era i remember i got a one of our advertisers who we shared because when we got going was something we didn't say earlier advertising and newsletters wasn't really much of a thing we had to convince like early adopters to give it a shot and so we had a lot of this we had shared advertisers and i would beg them like show me their click through rate versus our click through rate and what i learned was like it was basically like the same for a lot like it wasn't like significantly different but the for the first half of that year i thought we were gonna go of business the second half everything fucking boomed yeah it was crazy that was was big but like the business was booming like our trends thing was selling like crazy people were spending like crazy it was a boom and we ended up getting like i remember we got what was that call with the government gave you money like pee something yeah pete yeah we like got some of that money because our events business got shut down entirely and i was like i don't i don't know how i'm gonna make payroll and then it turned out i'm like damn i kinda feel bad because we killed it we killed it that year like i felt great i remember it the emotional journey of the acquisition was crazy for austin and i because our i don't know how long your sale process was but our crazy days it was it was lo lo to lo to closing was ninety days but then there was like thirty or sixty days of flirting yeah so ours looked completely different our process like end to end was eleven months so the first conversation with the person at on the axel spring side of things was november of twenty nineteen and i remember we first got deal terms i can't remember when it was but let's just call it like january or february march from actual or from who yeah from yeah and and i remember what happened was in march world shuts down there's a period of three weeks where austin i are like forget a deal we don't even know we're gonna have a business and then after those three weeks starting in april everything ripped and we went from austin i being like like we not that we don't even think we're gonna have a deal we don't even know we're gonna have a company after this too we're way under price we're doing so well are we even being paid appropriately for how much the business is ripping now and that roller coaster in those three or four months was insane it so we both sold that year the sales process that was the most intense part of my life it was horrible like it was so miserable i was so bummed for like almost every day for three months this woman who works with me her name's is edi she still works it at hubspot i believe i hired her earlier that year or maybe a few months before covid hit and she was probably sixty three or sixty five she basically had birthed her daughter a little bit later in life in her forties and was like now that my daughter's is twenty i'm gonna go back to work to prove to her that young women could kick ass and i was like hell yeah you're the best i'm gonna i would love to hire you and so she was like our hr person and our accounting person and she was great but then i learned during the deal process like i would we would be on a meeting with like me hubspot which had like six people k g accountants six people and then six lawyers so it's like that would been like it would like like like a like a twenty thousand dollar meeting and i hear ed and i kinda see her bring her iphone up and take a picture and i was like edi what the hell are you doing and she was like i don't know how to take a screenshot on my computer and they're talking about dropbox and i don't know how to use dropbox so i'm trying to like take pictures i'm like edi i gotta a teach teacher how to use dropbox man so and she's like brilliant she like nailed it and she so good at her job but she didn't know some of the technical stuff like using dropbox so i had to teach her during this process and i'm like i can't tell them that like we this is how scrappy we are wait did you use a banker she dude i hired a banker so the first time i tried to sell i hired a banker and we ended up getting an offer from vice and it was an all stock offer thank god i didn't take that and i used you be working mcdonald's oh my god like i went to tour the office and like no one was there and i was like where is everyone and they're all in sexual harassment training because like incidents there were like so common and i'm like you guys suck and so i hired a banker for that and i hated it and then i always thought that hubspot or a company like that should buy us and they reached out to me and i was like i don't need a banker like i'm gonna negotiate this when i started the company my goal to make twenty million dollars by the age of thirty i was like as long as i make that i don't care and the deal allowed that to happen and i so i didn't hire a banker and i actually talked to kip the cmo of hubspot and he told me that he tried buying you guys and he was like i wanted to buy both y'all and own the business newsletter space and he's like but they were too far along and you guys hadn't talked to anyone so i knew we're gonna be be able to buy you but not them yeah so i don't know if kip is totally being truthful i think kip wanted to buy us and i got the impression at the time that they were gonna make a hundred and twenty million dollar bet on on email newsletters they were really interested but because we did a better job of monetizing each subscriber you know we were more expensive and the hustle didn't care or hubspot didn't care about that extra revenue like you know okay it's or profit right ten million dollars of profit to the the hubspot they cared about our users right the classic and vertical integration and i think that you you know you said you always thought you're going gonna sell the hubspot i always thought we were gonna sell to fidelity or e trade or robin i thought it i means so much sense as an acquisition play and as a retention play and you know we we we pitched alex i'm was talking about this last night sam i think ever told you this story i definitely haven't told it on the podcast but we pitched a sofa and the ceo of so at the time was formerly the ceo or coo of twitter i think anthony nod and he really liked us or at least like the business and we went we pitched a group of executives at so and it's over zoom this is during covid and i'm like alec this is our pitch like this is our moment we're gonna sell for hundreds of millions we're get all the stock and so and it's going crazy and we pitched it for fifteen minutes and the woman i'm not kidding dead pants looks at alex and goes i don't get it you know i'm like which part and she's like why would we buy you guys i don't get the whole thing and i was like well you know content commerce we as an audience and the the other guy like the head of been development flips the the background of a screen and he shows so stadium right he shows that their big stadium and he goes three hundred million eyeballs a year i'm like what he goes that's how many people see this stadium you think we want three million emails what are we gonna do three million emails and that was the entire call what a douche that they your wife should have talked to them that fell that's insane to me but but i think i also i feel like you made a good point about like just the lesson incentives there yeah i mean at the end of the day we were telling the the marketing team of a company we can market your product better than you can you know what cmo what head of marketing is gonna buy a company unless they have a ton of humility if they believe that our pitches weakened do your job or than you can and and i think the she was pretty fearful and so that's why that's why that deal didn't go through so you know and we couldn't even get in touch with the fide fidelity the world that each raise the world they they didn't like they it wasn't in a conversation so that's when we went to to more media buyers like axel spring who already had made the offer in and a few others and look we shop i know about you i'm curious how many conversations you had we shopped it to everyone and we got no to all traditional media companies no one was interested hers her purse wasn't interested like new york times wasn't it no no media people were interested and frankly i hate the media industry so i was kind of happy yeah and that's part of the reason we sold is we were we were a i mean a couple hours before we sign we were unsure i was talking to all these people getting all this advice but we came back to we own the vast majority of the company and we didn't get a single offer in writing from another company and that was just terrifying to us a we said what if axel ray goes away and we're never gonna be able to sell this company of course at hindsight that's not true at the time you're so scared it was a you we made a a decision i think it was the right decision in hindsight but we did it partly because we were scared can i alright i wanna rattle off the so my story ends there in two thousand twenty we sold you guys sold half the company had then later sold the rest i wanna rattle off the future numbers but then i wanna talk about like a future stuff like what people listening and can learn so twenty one you did forty six million in revenue and ten million in profit twenty two seventy million in revenue ten million in profit twenty three was the same numbers and so i imagine the business now is was in the seventy eighty ninety million range something like that but you guys aren't owners anymore what do you think people doing now newsletters are really popular so i remember when subs started i thought it was a dumbest idea ever i chose not to invest in b i thought that was a silly idea i was wrong about both of those things what do you think that the people starting now are getting wrong and where's the opportunity in your opinion in this space i think the number one thing that people get wrong is they view this arbitrage that we had in twenty seventeen and they think it exists today they think the same economics exist today because they read a blog post that tyler dan wrote in twenty eighteen the value of a subscriber is significantly less than it was when we started because there's so many newsletters out there and people forget that the most important thing it goes back to what did we do in twenty eighteen we printed that there's letter out every day and we were not man over the content every person out there i see now on on bee not it ninety nine percent like oh here's an untapped market let me write like c plus or b minus content and let me use all these growth hacks and i'm gonna get you a million subscribers and i'm gonna sell all these ads and then they get to half a million or million subscribers if they can and their ads don't sell for fifty thousand dollars they sell for three thousand dollars and the economics don't work because there's not enough engagement because the content not good enough and so just people aren't focusing on the content it's all about the content that'd be like selling a saas product and the the the code not being very or the product not not working that well like you have to focus on the content first everything else follows yeah i would just add on and austin and i have obviously talked about this at length but the more niche the better like the internet is just this long tail of millions of niches and the more niche you go especially if you pick the right niches not only can you get higher cpm and i would argue that like in this advertising pullback that has happened for like the brew or just media companies in general b to b has been less impacted but the other part about it is you know the trouble we had at morning brew which i think you had less of at the hustle is we didn't know we could not figure out how to monetize our audience directly we tried everything we tried selling merch to them we tried the education product we couldn't figure out a good solution for your audience like i think causal trends was a really smart product for your audience the more niche you go i think the more clearer becomes how you can directly monetize your audience i think a big thing to learn for people starting now is my strategy was partially right partially wrong the strategy that i had i hated advertising i remember do you guys remember how like the sales guys always wear jeans and a plaid shirt and these bright brown shoes i remember i bought a pair of those brown shoes and i warm to one meeting in new york and i took them off at the end of the meeting and i threw them away and i like went home in my socks i was like i'm never wearing these fucking brown shoes that tech sales people wherever ever again i will never wear these brown shoes i just like to distinctly remember that because i hated it and so i was like i wanna create products to sell to my audience and what a lot of people get wrong about that is they go outside so like you know i think adam at and becca work week wanted to sell like software products or something like that and that strategy that they and many other people if who or i don't even know if they did do it but whoever wants to try and do that it will almost always fail because in order to make a business like this work where you sell up to your audience you almost always have to it has to be within your core competency of content and if the founder is not like what mark zuckerberg was to facebook of being like a tech wizard you need to be that about content otherwise it's not always but almost always otherwise the the business sucks and so i think that for the people listening if you are going to build something go super hard on content make money via advertising which is the right thing to do and then if you do make money in other ways you will almost always wanna make money in ways that fit within like the e guy of like your company's core competency and what the world wants is some type of content d media thing yeah we we see it all the time where people start a media company they try to sell a product and it's really hard because you're pivoting from a content company to a product company or software company it it's really really tough it's like buzzfeed like doing haven't they tried like making ovens or something like that yeah with tasty they have like their entire cook ware brand yeah i think at the end of the day it's like basically you you just are adding so much complexity to your business the especially the more you get out of your core because it's like peep like a media company and content like content is the product a media company is a business then what you're basically saying is you wanna create an entirely different business and now what you need to figure out is the entirely different business is the product exceptional do you have someone who understands it deeply who can run it then the media side can you keep that going in the right way and then also is there an intersection where your audience not only trusts you but trusts the thing that you're now selling them that's a different product like there there's so many more moving pieces what else for different opportunity you guys had on here that you being based in new york helped i agree with that it helped you guys a lot i think being like if you are an ai company being in san francisco is beneficial if you are a media contact company being in new york is beneficial i think that was huge for us i think if you wanna build a a a big brand in media you have to be where the ad agencies are and i mean alex was just grinding and going to add agencies and meeting with people talking to people if he lived in austin those people weren't there he was never gonna be help be with them in person yeah it's like you're your way you're you're not in it to win it if you are not in new york yeah one other thing i i'd say is like i think actually sam you and i feel differently about newsletters now like i know kind of your perspective is like newsletters are so much harder you you wouldn't necessarily do it today my my general view is like i feel like we're like past early of every media channel on planet earth like i don't think anything's is early anymore like podcast podcasts have been saturated youtube has been saturated newsletters have been saturated like everything is harder in my mind so i think like the game overall has become harder that said i still think there were gonna always be opportunities as especially in a niche that you know a lot about to succeed so like i would say i am still bullish on newsletters as a way of owning your audience i just think the the level you have to play the game is higher than where we had to play the game one other just random thought is i used to always hate the news business like i thought the news business was such a bad business to be in because you need so many people to crank out content the economics are horrible i would actually argue with kind of where we are in society now and you know re like general dis trust of news broadly of traditional news relay i think there's a ton of opportunity to actually disrupt news as an ups start and i think we've seen that with like barry weiss in the free press and i think we'll see more of that over the next few years so here's wanna know what one of my takes on is for like we're interesting opportunities are i i would bet my life i bet my life you guys agree with me quarterly or monthly hard cover magazines or some type of physical newsletter yeah i love that i almost made so we did money wise a podcast about it's like a personal finance podcast for high net worth people i almost made that i was gonna make it a five hundred two thousand dollar a year shows up quarterly in a manila envelope staple printer paper but really well written articles to keep it like like to feel like a mom and pop type of like underground z that's what i thought about doing and i still think someone could pull that off and you seen arena magazine is that the thing you love yeah so i think it's really cool it's this guy max mayer i believe he worked at eight vc with joe long and he started this magazine it's quarterly now i don't i can't tell you if it's gonna be a big business but they tell the coolest stories and it's beautiful like this thing is done you know like a magazine is even twenty or thirty years ago where you're selling super high gloss paper and the graphics are amazing and then you're probably charging at seven thousand dollar cpm to some beauty brands that it's amazing and stripe is making these really cool ads and ramp it's it's awesome everyone it should check out arena may what i would do is so you said beautiful i would make it the opposite of beautiful i would pick an industry that has a lot of employees whether it's like the financial advisory industry or the advertising world in industry something where there's like a hundred or a few hundred thousand people but you are only one or two degrees separated from each person and the whole name of the game would be name as many names as possible and as many companies as possible in it and so you would want to like bot it for all of your staff and you would have like rankings like the top this person this quarter and it would because it was almost like the difference do you remember when oscar started advertising in the subway versus on like a computer if for some reason when you say see casper out in the open versus on facebook you think oh wow this is like way more legit and exciting i would do that right now for an industry and i would name as many names as possible so they would just be paying money in fee per year d just to have their name on paper yeah like that the the par thirty under thirty something like that but for like financial advisers or something but i hate financial advisers so it would be like like you all suck but here's the lee sucky ones any other interesting opportunities that you wanna bring up i think that's i mean the media space i i think that's it for like the newsletter stuff i i still think the big opportunity the media space if someone almost take a big swing someone wants to go build a billion dollar company it's to do what we're talking about into or with the hustle did right use content to build something like a trend but do it to the extreme so i think the best example right now look at what overtime doing oh dan dan porter who's been on the show is amazing right and for the first three years this business i didn't get it at all i said over i know was so stupid so dumb i like this guy is an idiot he left all these awesome jobs he could do anything and he built another company off a ton of funding and all he did was just put sports on social and next thing you know he's doing basketball tournaments i'm like bad like kinda cute and then he's running a league that's trying to compete with college basketball and i'm like holy shit this guy is on a different level he's trying to compete with the nc double and the nba that's a big swing like you know if if in a couple of years i build another big company i would think like that right whether it's you know basketball like that or or patel i think it's really interesting or there's people now thinking about doing in tennis there are so many interesting niches where you can go take a massive swing and try to compete with you know the biggest organizations in the world yeah i've i have a a few on add on top of that the first is a media company focused on alternatives what's an alternative alternative to what like alternative investments so like real estate private equity venture etcetera like my whole thing is alternative investments are becoming a bigger part of people's portfolios but they're more opaque they're harder to understand but they're also really interesting ways to monetize people who are investing in alternatives i think basically a company that becomes like the go to source for figuring out the complexity of investing in alternative assets is going to make a killing i think that's the first the second is basically for a long time austin and i talked about how an amazing way to monetize our audience if we could figure it out would be like our version of motley fool and the reason we never did it is like motley fool built an incredible business but what yep but but but our thing was like the marketing just does not feel good to us and so i think if someone can figure out how to support retail investors in a way that makes them smarter about not losing their money in the markets and media is just like you know the funnel to it even like when we were at that newsletter conference two weeks ago right in james all teacher was talking about what he makes on his premium said he made a hundred he did said it on stage he said a hundred and twenty million dollars year in revenue yeah and so so i think that is still a massive opportunity as wealth this is awesome guys thanks for doing this how do you feel feel good that was therapy me that was the most therapy i've done in my life i think but for the record you know i i never hated you guys i hated this story that i made up of you and for the listener over the past like three or four years austin and i have become very very close where our families are hanging out on saturday alex you and our we did a family hang two weeks ago i have nothing but love for you guys i consider you guys family and you're some of my closest friends and so it it's been fun to to get soft instead of like you know wanting to compete because now that i know more about you guys over the past like ten years i don't wanna ever compete against you ever again you guys are very formidable and not people i wanna go against it was horrible not nothing but love from our side yeah quite the one eighty from twenty eighteen it was all the story which by the way i think if you're listening to this and you have a company having that story was so helpful yeah like going having an enemy was so helpful even if it's made up it's funny to say that i will use this time to plug my new newsletter that's launching and one of my first newsletters that i i i've written is about enemies and i think having enemy whether it's real or fake right for us it was the skin and the hustle i think it's really really important you know bee h has convertkit and i think it just motivates everyone a little bit more and i know nathan and he's the sweetest guy ever i've gotten to know tyler a little bit and he seemed like a wonderful guy and i'm like i'm not gonna start stop you guys from fighting because i think a fights good and also i know that you're both wonderful people and you would love each other in a different world or when this is all dud but you have like you have to have that so i'm on board which just six six years from now one of them is gonna have a podcast my first email and they're gonna both be on it and it's gonna be all hugs what's your thing austin where do they get it you can just find in my twitter dms or sorry my twitter bio now well i appreciate y'all and thanks for doing this if you google your name austin by the way it's that stupid photo of you guys on the white wall that you've been using for like fifteen years and it's your last episode of my first million so it's funny how we have all come to work together alright we appreciate you y'all that's it that's the pod thanks i feel like got rude work i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go travel never looking back but