Jason Schulweis, Head of Partnerships at Morning Brew, on building a B2B Media Company

Brian Bosché:
Hi everyone, welcome back to creativeBTS, this is Brian Bosché. And today, I am so excited to bring on Jason Schulweis, the SVP and head of brand partnerships at Morning Brew. Jason, how's it going?

Jason Schulweis:
It is as good as can be. And thank you, Brian, so much for having me on. I'm super excited to talk to you about everything Morning Brew, B2B media and more.

Brian Bosché:
Yes. And I've been personally, I wouldn't say obsessed, but as a former founder, I do get a little mania about certain topics, and dive into them. So the last year, I've gotten really interested in B2B media. So I have obviously followed Morning Brew as you're growing so fast. And then saw the launch of Marketing Brew, which is particular passion of mine. I've been working on that for the last decade.

Brian Bosché:
So wanted to bring you on to talk about not only Marketing Brew, how you launched that, but B2B media in general. And it seems like we're in the era of newsletters, which is a flashback right now, or it used to be newsletters, it's back. I love it too. Newsletters as media companies. But what I'd love to first start off with, just going through your background a little bit more.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been at Morning Brew for a year now, and oversee the whole revenue orb, which is brand partnerships, which are sales, account management, integrated marketing strategy, and creative.

Jason Schulweis:
And I've done bits and pieces of all of those things throughout my career. So 12 years ago, started at an agency in New York, Deep Focus. Did a lot of media planning, and buying, and fell in love with media, and marketing. And just went from there.

Jason Schulweis:
One of the companies that we worked a lot with at Deep Focus was Yahoo. I went to Yahoo for three and a half years. Was in account management, was in sales, was in social strategy. Then moved to Thrillest Media Group, to run a sales marketing team. Then went to Live Nation to do very similar things in integrated marketing. And then the job that I had prior to Morning Brew, for a little over two years, was as an SVP at MediaLink. So doing a lot of media marketing and sales strategy consulting.

Brian Bosché:
Great. And going from MediaLink, and making the hop to a startup can always be scary for some people as you're starting something new. So what prompted your move to Morning Brew from MediaLink?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, and so I wasn't active out in market looking. It's an interesting story in that I got introduced to Alex, the CEO and co-founder, by a mutual friend of ours. And we had drinks, we were catching up, were just talking about media. I was thinking maybe I can bring Alex on to be a client of mine.

Jason Schulweis:
But I was so impressed by Alex, and his poise, and maturity, and intelligence, and the way that he had been building this company. We just kept on talking, and talking, and talking. And one of the things that he really wanted to build out, he and Austin really wanted to build out about a year ago was the sales function and revenue function.

Jason Schulweis:
And I think my background in that I have had exposure to really all of those different things within the sales umbrella, I think really struck a chord with him. And we started talking about the way that I would approach that. We ended that that conversation with him saying, "So can you come ... Is that something that you would want to do?"

Brian Bosché:
Please.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, let's do this. And then that kicked off a number of conversations with him, and Austin, and the team. And I'd love to say the rest is history, but we're-

Brian Bosché:
Still early on.

Jason Schulweis:
Exactly. We're still actively making history. But I mean, it's been absolutely incredible over the last year. And everything that I saw in Alex, I see in Austin, and them as a founder duo is really second to none.

Jason Schulweis:
Again, the vision, and the fact that Morning Brew has not taken any VC money, and it is a profitable media company, and everyone from them down on the team is smart, is nice, and cares so deeply about Morning Brew, and the product, and what we're doing. It's special. It's unique.

Brian Bosché:
Well, I always hear that from people who join startups where it's actually a good fit, is they can't stop thinking about it. They have the first interaction, and it just sits there. Because when it's not a good fit, you're like, "Okay, cool. That's a cool startup." And you forget about it the next day. But when it just sits there broiling. And you're like, "You know what, I really like this team. I like their vision." That's when it's usually a good fit.

Jason Schulweis:
Yes.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah.

Jason Schulweis:
And I think it's been somewhere between good fit and perfect fit.

Brian Bosché:
That's great to hear. Especially during the pandemic where a lot of media is struggling, to see you guys continue to grow. So for the audience who doesn't know what Morning Brew is, give me the quick pitch, the elevator pitch, even though you're not a VC backed company. What is Morning Brew?

Jason Schulweis:
I still have to give elevator pitches even though.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, everyone does. You're right, it's not just VC companies.

Jason Schulweis:
So we are a media company. And our mission is to empower modern business leaders with engaging and accessible content. And we do that through newsletters, we do that through podcasts, and now increasingly, as we diversify our products, we're doing it through branded content, and virtual events. And really whatever is next, we want to do that. But like, I think, with good well run companies, we want to grow responsibly.

Brian Bosché:
Yup. And Morning Brew is the company name, but it's also the leading franchise that drove a lot of the initial revenue, still drives a lot of the revenue. And then you have a number of other franchises. Can you talk about how you've split it up under that umbrella?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, absolutely. And so we have five newsletter properties right now. There's Morning Brew. Well, there are five-ish. I'll explain. So we have Morning Brew, which is one that goes out Monday through Saturday. We've got The Light Roast, which only goes to folks that have a few successful referrals. We've got The Essentials, which actually was spawned of the success of our Guide To Living Your Best Quarantine Life.

Brian Bosché:
Okay.

Jason Schulweis:
We realized that there was a play there. And so that is going to continue to be a focus for us. We've got Marketing Brew, Retail Brew, Emerging Tech Brew, which we will ... in the B2B media world. But we also have Business Casual, which is our podcast.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. And so each of these, you call them properties, or franchises, because they are a specific target market focus that have a range of different types of content you'll produce for it.

Jason Schulweis:
Exactly. Exactly. There is some common DNA across all of them, like the ideas of engaging in accessible content for a modern business professional, I think holds true throughout all of them. But we absolutely look to build each of those specific franchise target audience, and core demographic specific to what that it. And I think that becomes increasingly important as we dive into the B2B properties.

Brian Bosché:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And it's interesting to see companies like The Skin, The Information, The Athletic even popping up where it's more of the premium targeted content that's gated, and that you have to subscribe to, or at least sign up to get access.

Brian Bosché:
So talk to us a little bit, what opportunity did the Morning Brew team find to actually launch something like this? What was the gap in the market that people weren't getting from maybe a TechCrunch, or other business publications?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. For Morning Brew, or for.

Brian Bosché:
Just Morning Brew as an umbrella. What's the B2B opportunity here that the team saw?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. So with Morning Brew, I mean, that was started in 2015 by Alex at the University of Michigan. It was called.

Brian Bosché:
Oh, it's a whole Michigan team. I didn't. That's why you guys clicked.

Jason Schulweis:
We over index on Michigan. So the origin of that was really a consumer insight where he had a little bit of time on his hands his senior year, and was helping students prepare for interviews in their jobs next year. And when he would ask, "How do you prepare? How do you become a better business professional?" Everyone had the same answer that, "I have to read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover."

Jason Schulweis:
That is not sustainable. I don't think many people actually did that. And I don't think it's that fun. And so there had to be a better way. So he started creating what was effectively the first iterations of Morning Brew. He found Austin because Austin was one of the subscribers, and provided him really solid feedback.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah.

Jason Schulweis:
Fast forward a couple years. They decided to make this ... It just started to scale, and scale, and scale, because people found out about it, loved it, wanted to read it, and referred their friends. And we went from a couple people I guess in 2015 on the Michigan campus to now 2.3 million people across the United States, which is pretty cool.

Jason Schulweis:
And so for us, there continues to be just constant reassurance I think, from our audience, that there is a need for something like this that is free, that is very well written, and smart, and witty, and engaging, and conversational.

Jason Schulweis:
And reaching a modern professional, which is what we call it, and it's very intentionally a psychographic, but that audience represents, I think, a very unique opportunity in market, because these folks are consumers. But as the average age is around 29, 30, these are also business professionals that are able to make decisions, enterprise level decisions for their businesses. And so you do see, I think, a very healthy mix of consumer focused companies in Morning Brew, but also B2B focused companies in Morning Brew.

Brian Bosché:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I can't believe it's 2.3 million. Just coming from a company [inaudible 00:11:08] constantly trying to get signups, and building our newsletter, I can't even fathom what it would take to build a list that big.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, I was going to say, the fun vanity metric there is not just the ... Is the scale, but the 40, 42% open rate.

Brian Bosché:
The open rates. Yeah, that's insane to me. We would be good if we got ... I mean, what's industry best? It depends on the industry. But you're shooting for 10 to ... Or I guess open rate, 20%, maybe click throughs 2%. But it becomes a habit. You guys have become my habit where I open it every time. It's my trusted resource. And there's not many newsletters that are like that.

Jason Schulweis:
Thank you.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah.

Jason Schulweis:
You made my day.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. So as you build this out, who do you ... You have all these properties, you have these franchises. How do you bring on team members to actually run them? Or is it one person? Give the audience a little bit of an idea of actually how you create these things, because we're in a creator economy. There's Patreon, OnlyFans, which might pivot to B2B, you never know. Similar model.

Brian Bosché:
And so you have a lot of these people doing it individually. Do you source people like that, that you see have traction? Or how do you actually build the team around these different properties?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. So I mean, way back when, it was Alex, and then it went Neil. And Neil is one of the longest tenured Morning Brew employees. He is our managing editor. The voice is very much his. His Twitter profile, I think says, "I literally want to give everyone newsletters." That's his bio.

Jason Schulweis:
And we hired in December, I think it was November of December, Samir Sheth to be our head of content and help provide more structure to the org. And we've been hiring more and more folks on so that we can scale that org.

Jason Schulweis:
But I think what's interesting is, a lot of our writers don't necessarily come from traditional writing or journalist backgrounds. I think there is an intellectual curiosity they all share, there is a style of writing they all share, there is that something that they all share. And it's a very intensive process to get those folks on board, and to find them. And we're hiring for a bunch more content creator positions now.

Jason Schulweis:
But yeah, I think as you ... What's interesting I think, the Morning Brew tone and voice is something that, you know it when you see it. And as we grow, and as more people know us, I think the pool of people who apply get better, which has been a really cool thing to see. And I mean, I just admire it from afar, because the content side of the house is all the way on the other side. But without the incredible talent there, I would have nothing to sell.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah< that makes a lot of sense. And you see companies like Overtime, Barstool Sports, Bleacher Report, where they provide the back office operations, the legal, the ... All the not fun stuff for creatives. And they'll bring people on as contractors, or specific contracts. Are all the content creators employees at Morning Brew?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
How do you actually structure the ... They're all employees?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
That makes it easy. Great.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. It's super easy. And we've got, as I said, we have amazing content folks on the editorial side. And we have four, soon to be five, content creators on my team as well within our creative department, who are creating the ads, who are the copywriters. And increasingly, as we've done branded content that has performed incredibly well, we're developing and flushing out that capability for us too.

Brian Bosché:
Great. That's a perfect segue to, how does Morning Brew make money?

Jason Schulweis:
We sell ads. No. We do sell ads, and sponsorships of the newsletter. But the way in which we do it is different. I've been in a lot of media organizations that, yes, sell content, and sell branded content, but also sell standard display ads, and things like that. There's nothing that you see on Morning Brew that is not handmade. It's nothing that ...

Jason Schulweis:
So we write everything. And even in the newsletter, there are no standard ads that go in there. There is a logo at the top for our primary sponsor. But all of the ads are effectively miniature pieces of branded content, or native content that we write. And that has powered the revenue of Morning Brew in a very meaningful way across all of our newsletters.

Jason Schulweis:
And the idea of working with a partner, and taking their messaging points, and turning it into our tone and voice has worked really, really well. Our audience appreciates it. And even when we started doing the podcasts, they're host read. And so the idea of turning something into our tone and voice, like when Kinsey reads something, that is quite literally Morning Brew's tone and voice.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah.

Jason Schulweis:
Which is a very awesome thing, and I think an easy sell. And so we were primarily newsletter monetization. We've expanded that now to audio, we've expanded that now to branded content. And we're very rapidly expanding beyond that with virtual events and other bigger content packages that live outside of the newsletter, and will live on morningbrew.com separately. So really exciting stuff on the horizon.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. And you mentioned a little bit earlier where you'll basically do whatever is next, whatever is the next content. So you don't have to give me all your secrets, but what's exciting to you right now? Virtual space? What do you see as other content packages that not just Morning Brew, but other people can start getting into?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. I mean, the virtual event space is obviously very, very hot right now.

Brian Bosché:
And I pitched a couple companies. I wanted to do ... Because I was looking forward to a few really good conferences, like Adobe's conference, Summit.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
And I was like, "Can we just build a Fortnite island and just, we all get our avatars and go into a Fortnite island, and I can walk around the booths, and go to a big stage like the concerts?" And it just was a video conference.

Jason Schulweis:
Well, I think there are a lot of companies that are experimenting with either Fortnite, or Animal Crossing, or some sort of virtual equivalent. I guess I miss the in real life of conferences a lot.

Brian Bosché:
Yes, me too.

Jason Schulweis:
I loved that. I feel like I am driven by the need to shmooze. But alas, we're now doing this all virtually. So making do. But I still think there's a lot of opportunity there outside of the virtual world space, but even in the more day to day where the way that we look at it is outside of webinars, that's a word we don't typically use at Morning Brew. We like calling it a virtual event, because it's more like edutainment.

Brian Bosché:
And engagement. People can engage and passively listen.

Jason Schulweis:
Right. You're still asking for people's time. And no one really wants to be talked at. And so there is, I think, a way to do it better. And so whenever we go, we find something that's of interest, and we want to go into it, we always are thinking, "How can we do this better? Or how can we do this in a way that feels very Morning Brew?"

Jason Schulweis:
And I think some of the virtual events that we've done to date, for Retail Brew, and Emerging Tech Brew, and a couple weeks ago with the launch event for Marketing Brew, I think we're starting to really hit our stride.

Brian Bosché:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and that's a great transition to our actual case study that we're going to go over where we can flesh this out in a much more practical way with something that actually happened. The launch of the Marketing Brew franchise. So to start off with, how many did you ... You had five, or four before you launched Marketing Brew?

Jason Schulweis:
Yes.

Brian Bosché:
So this is the fifth franchise property that you're launching. What made you interested in expanding into the marketing space? Because it is a competitive space, I mean, creative BTS, and there's a lot of content out there for marketers. What made you interested in going after that vertical? Or horizontal? It's both?

Jason Schulweis:
Well, it's both in that it is a function, and it is an industry.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah.

Jason Schulweis:
Which is tough to target.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I deal with that every day.

Jason Schulweis:
Well, there are agencies, and marketing just companies. But then there's also marketing in every single company. So it's ...

Brian Bosché:
Right.

Jason Schulweis:
Right. So I think both of those types of people and industries should read Marketing Brew. I think there were a couple of reasons why. This is, to us, a very dynamic space. We're all fascinated by marketing, and advertising, and especially given Morning Brew's business model, it makes sense that we are also students of how we exist, and why we exist.

Jason Schulweis:
There is a very large addressable market for this. There is a lot of demand. Almost meta demand. Because for us, as a company that makes money talking to marketers, to be able to actually better talk to marketers is an interesting way to talk to marketers.

Jason Schulweis:
But I think also, a lot of the best known, or biggest marketing and advertising media companies or publications are pay walled now. And that's great from a business model perspective. But I think what we've been out to prove is that there is nothing wrong with an ad supported model if you do it well. And so we're really excited to be able to do that, especially in this space.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. And we met through the marketing Twitter group on Slack, and on marketing Twitter. So obviously it's a community that wants to engage in talk, and have content, and go.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
Which is, our community was really excited for the launch event.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, go ahead.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, I was just saying, the response was so overwhelming when we started to promote it, and everyone was like, "Oh my God, I can't wait to do that." And for me, obviously professional Morning Brew Jason, that's amazing, so awesome. But I think being a marketing nerd is so core to who I am, that us ... Seeing the company that I work for do this, and then seeing the response to it has just been like I've been on cloud nine.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. And it's not just ... It is a big target market. There's a lot of marketers out there. It's a lot of engaging stuff. Marketers are typically cutting edge with stuff, so it's the emerging tech plus marketing, is often, they're very overlapping.

Brian Bosché:
But I also, the sense that I've gotten from the marketing community is, the pandemic started, and messaging became incredibly difficult. And then Black Lives Matter movement, social justice movement, got even more difficult. So people are not only dealing with that personally, but in their professional marketing lives, they have to build campaigns, and messaging. And we're isolated at home, so they don't have the community.

Brian Bosché:
And then I just saw this explosion on Twitter, and on our marketing Twitter Slack about people just reaching out to other marketers, trying to brainstorm, trying to figure out how to handle this situation. So I think you couldn't have timed it better with unfortunate circumstances. But this is a time where people are looking for that community. And this is a great platform for it. So kudos on the timing.

Jason Schulweis:
Thank you.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. For better or for worse. But I want to go back to, what is the process of this starting? I've started an agency, started a tech company, and there's always these bruise for you, no pun intended, for a while of, "Okay, we want to do this, we want to do this." What actually led to pulling the trigger of, "All right, we're actually going to launch this."?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. I mean, it's a long process. Marketing Brew, or marketing was not the only next vertical or industry that we had been thinking about. But we started to feel really good about it. And fortunately, we've got an amazingly loyal audience that will help and hop on calls so that we can talk through, "Does this make sense? Do you ... If we were to launch something new."

Jason Schulweis:
But not just for my network. But Alex and Austin also have such a massive network of marketers, and agency contacts that ... We built this with a lot of reader, and perspective reader input.

Brian Bosché:
Yup. So you're doing your market research, your customer development just like if you were starting a company.

Jason Schulweis:
Exactly. I mean, each of these things is its own business unit. And so we have to have that level of diligence when launching something like this to ensure it will be successful, and lives up to the very high bar and standards that we set.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. And I know this is applicable to any media company, and even any organization that's launching a new newsletter, or a new property. What kind of resources or team did you put behind it? Did you designate a few people to run it? Did it just operate within your infrastructure? How did you actually get the team and people behind it set up to actually launch this thing?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, I mean, we have, we call them cross functional meetings for every both product and franchise. And so we had this idea for a while, and hired for ... And hired Phoebe Bain as our marketing writer. But we didn't launch Marketing Brew until it was a month or two months even after she started so that we could perfect it.

Jason Schulweis:
And so what it requires is and editor, a writer, a PM, and buy in from a number ... And our growth team to actually determine how quickly we can grow this, and how. And by the way, their estimate for what the audience makeup was, and how many of those people after a week of sends, was only off by less than 1,000.

Brian Bosché:
Wow.

Jason Schulweis:
So the way that we're able to figure out how to grow these things is very scientific. And then it's a lot of, this one in particular, for my team, we started talking to a lot of our clients about Marketing Brew, and getting them signed up, because they are the target audience. And so we were starting to help build up demand while this was being built. And anyone, of course, who signed up ahead of time, got access to the launch event.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. So let's talk about the actual building up to a launch, because there's a lot of plans for that. Give us an idea of what that launch plan was. I hope you were cross posting, and using your existing audience, and putting events together. So what was that plan like?

Jason Schulweis:
Well, so it's interesting. We did use some of our existing audience. But what we wanted to do was be cautious in who we were leveraging of our initial audience to make sure that they also fit the Marketing Brew target.

Jason Schulweis:
And so I think that's core to B2B media is that is, if we say that Marketing Brew is industry and B2B media, we need to be really sure that those readers are marketers. And so that was super, super important for us. And so fortunately, we know, through a lot of conversations, and surveys, and data, who of our readership actually falls into there. And so we're able to build in that way.

Jason Schulweis:
And we had, I think, between five and 6,000 early signups and registrations for the Marketing Brew event. We started really pushing that out about two weeks beforehand.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, it was a quick turnaround.

Jason Schulweis:
It was pretty quick turnaround. And we had started to build a little slower before then, but then really started to ramp it up. And especially at that two week mark when we were able to announce the participants, and really put our foot on the gas.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. It's amazing how fast turnaround that is. I just interviewed Jazerai Allen-Lord, who creative director. Put together the Reebok Classics launch. So it's an apparel shoe company. And that's 24, 18 months out before launch. So it's amazing how fast B2B media can move, or media in general moves compared to other industries.

Jason Schulweis:
When I was talking about The Essentials before, and when we made the decision to take the inspiration from the piece of content, and turn it into a newsletter, it was a week turnaround between, "Okay, let's put this into a newsletter." And actually sending out the first newsletter.

Brian Bosché:
That's incredible. And you have to move that fast. I mean, that's the demand. You got to adapt in that industry.

Jason Schulweis:
But fortunately, we're still small enough where that's doable. And we have a lot of the infrastructure. We can send newsletters. That is a thing that we are objectivelY really, really good at. And so we were able to do that. And we also have a lot of proprietary tech and products that allow us to also do that very quickly.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. So share as little or as much as you want here. But for the back end technology side, which I've been building marketing software, creative software for a while now.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
What do you use to collaborate as a team, coordinate work? Are you a Mailchimp shop? IP shop? Or your own that you use for newsletters? What is it like actually working on the tech stack at Morning Brew?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, so our head of tech and product, Tyler Denk, has actually written a few pieces on medium where he has lifted up the hood and described a lot of the proprietary tech that he's built for both my team and the content team. So I'll send you those.

Brian Bosché:
Oh, great.

Jason Schulweis:
But yeah, it's really interesting stuff. He's also written at length about our referral program. So we're not shy about sharing. And so that's been, I mean, pretty incredible, and allows us to automate a lot of the things that a lot of other media companies cannot still automate. And then on the other tech stack side, we use Sailthru.

Brian Bosché:
Yup. Sponsor. Great. Good call out.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. I mean, that was also ... We use them on the product and content side, but they also see a lot of value in advertising on Marketing Brew, and Retail Brew. They are a phenomenal B2B advertiser for our B2B properties. So it is a perfect synergy.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, good relationship there.

Jason Schulweis:
Yes. We got a good relationship there. And then outside of that, I mean, we use Slack, we use ... And then we use Gmail as our ... We're on the G Suite.

Brian Bosché:
Nice.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
It's the boring stuff that actually is pretty important, because it helps drive ... Coming from a productivity software background, it's really hard to get teams to adopt that consistent production workflow. But it helps. I've worked with companies where, "All right, we have to figure out how to produce 50 videos today. How are we going to take that on and actually get it out the door?"

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
Which can be really difficult. Okay, so you're building up to this launch event. Talk to us a little bit about the virtual launch event, because it's one of the best that I've actually seen through the pandemic. So I'd love a breakdown of that a little bit. Yeah, it was great. It was super enjoyable. It does not feel passive. It was a blend between a Zoom happy hour with 15 people versus a webinar with thousands. So talk a little bit about how you actually put that event together, and how it went.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, no, thank you so much for saying that. I will relay that to the team as well, they'll be super happy. Yeah, I mean, it started with, when we were originally ideating Marketing Brew, it's like, "We need to launch this thing in a way that makes sense in a marketing environment." If we're going to be an industry publication, we need to act like an industry mainstay, and like an industry publication. And especially if we're going to be launching it at a time where there is no Cannes. We were originally going to potentially try to do something during Cannes Lion to launch this. And so-

Brian Bosché:
Oh, that's why you're missing the events. It's not bad when you're going to Cannes.

Jason Schulweis:
Sorry. Yeah, I miss the South of France.

Brian Bosché:
I miss the South of France. That's so.

Jason Schulweis:
But so we knew we wanted to do something. We knew we had to change it up a little bit when COVID changed everyone's plans. And so the idea of a virtual event made just a ton of sense to us. And it was a good opportunity to make some asks to marketing friends of ours. And I think, not to flex our cache in marketing, but I think it's important in our industry to have really strong thought leaders when you do things like that. But to marry that with substantive topics.

Jason Schulweis:
And so you can't just have five CMOs who only want to talk about the things that they want to talk about. But you also can't have necessarily folks that might be super, super smart, but don't necessarily have the pull and the draw of top tier talent asks. And so we were very surgical with who we were asking. And I think that first panel with Amanda Goetz and Jason Grunberg, and Rishad Tobaccowala was amazing. And I mean, Rishad is, I feel like, the industry's teacher and professor. He is so smart.

Brian Bosché:
Because that's what attracts people.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
I mean, Amanda is a big contributor to marketing Twitter. So that's like, "She's on the panel? I'm in."

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. And it was so cool, because I've never actually met her, but I've interacted with her on Twitter. And so I know who she is. And so she is ... Getting the combination of her, and someone like Rishad, and someone like Jason, that was really cool, and special.

Jason Schulweis:
And then the second panel with Frank Cooper and James Rowe was also something that was really cool, because they also, they work together, because adam&eveDDB is the creative and comms agency Black Rock. And being able to not have to worry about your panel's camaraderie, that is super cool.

Jason Schulweis:
And of course, it doesn't hurt when we have Kinsey, who does this for a living, help moderates it. It went very, very smoothly. And yeah, I mean, I feel there was a good combination of luck and skill when it came to getting those folks. And yeah.

Brian Bosché:
And how do you think about building that momentum moving forward? Are you building out the type of content you produce for it? How do you going to keep this rolling?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, I mean, we already have more lines of connection into some of the other marketing leaders that we admire. And we're building out an oped program inside of Marketing Brew, to better give a voice, and help amplify marketing voices that we want to push, and amplify.

Jason Schulweis:
And a lot of ... I think the sky is the limit with doing virtual events like that. And hopefully working with a lot of cool marketing teams inside of Marketing Brew. But I take that as my action item to try to have some really great marketing campaigns inside of Marketing Brew.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, well I just had a podcast with Matt Desmond who runs the Sports Creative Community. And they started that two years ago, and now have almost 5,000 members on a Slack group. And it's pretty incredible how they've built that community out. And the events, and the events that you put on ... And they do weekly happy hours as well. It actually makes it feel like a community instead of a broadcaster where I'm just consuming information. And I feel like I can actually interact with it, or I know the person writing it.

Brian Bosché:
And so I've loved how you guys have done that, how it continues to roll where I feel like I'm actually a part of Marketing Brew, and a contributor, and I'm giving feedback. And not to praise you too much, because you have to grow still. I'm not going to give you an out. But it does really help, because I think all of us are a little lonely, isolated, and feeling like you're a part of the community, and part of a launch, the exclusive invite as a part of the launch is special, and it makes a big impact.

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah. The community component, to us, is very core to Morning Brew's DNA. And I think Phoebe said multiple times, "If you hit reply, it goes to my inbox, and I will reply back to you." And we have that across all of our newsletters. All of our editors are very active on Twitter. And so there is this sense of Morning Brew is a brand, but Morning Brew is just really, we are an amalgamation of this amazing writing and editorial talent that we have. But making sure that there is a two way dialogue and conversation with our readers is ... I mean, that's the special sauce.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. And as we close this out, what is ... You're not VC backed. And zooming back out a little bit again. What's the growth goals? Or the next few years look like for Morning Brew? If it's a VC backed, that means you're launching 100 newsletters next month. But what is the growth like for ... Not to roast VCs constantly. But I'm scarred. But what does the growth rate look like moving forward?

Jason Schulweis:
It is an aggressive percent.

Brian Bosché:
Oh, yeah, I don't need actual numbers. But is it a ton more verticals you're going after? Going deeper in existing verticals?

Jason Schulweis:
Yeah, I think it's all in the vein of responsible growth. And what I mean by that is, we're not going to necessarily rush to launch a bunch of new verticals. And I think it's a very careful balance of, we'll probably launch more verticals, but there going to be very meticulously chosen.

Jason Schulweis:
We are also going to go deeper in the different franchises. And I think tying it back with B2B, I think that is so important. That’s the reason why B2B media publications are able to charge more, it's because the value is huge. And you're able to go deeper, and not just provide information via a newsletter, but also trends, and surveys, and virtual events, and content [inaudible 00:40:14] make you better at your job. And I think also as we've been thinking about from a B2B standpoint, and going deeper, and providing more value, I think education is something that's a really big and interesting topic for us too.

Brian Bosché:
Morning Brew University?

Jason Schulweis:
Maybe.

Brian Bosché:
Competing with Harvard.

Jason Schulweis:
Harvard is the Morning Brew of the East, is it not?

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, exactly. On the West Coast.

Jason Schulweis:
But yeah. And so I think there's a lot of opportunities for us to keep expanding in just a very smart way without being like, "Oh, newsletters are working, 10 new newsletters." But yeah, I think it's important for us to just continue to nurture what we've got, and definitely go deeper.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. That's great. And I leave every Creative BTS with the parting shot. So your wisdom that you want to get across, a little summary. All right, so, Jason, what is your parting shot to the audience?

Jason Schulweis:
Absolutely. So my parting shot is for the recent grads, and up and coming professionals where I think there are a lot of amazing opportunities. And the most important thing is to just get your foot in the door somewhere. And just, the things that you can do to succeed early on really have nothing to do with prior experience or skill. It's all about hard work, a good attitude, being curious, asking great questions, taking notes and following up. There are a few things that you can do like that, that are intangible, and can't really be taught that will accelerate your career faster than you think or know.

Brian Bosché:
That's great advice. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Jason, I appreciate it.

Jason Schulweis:
Brian, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing you again soon on the interwebs.

Brian Bosché:
Yes. Or maybe a virtual conference, or maybe at Cannes. Hopefully at Cannes.

Jason Schulweis:
In the South of France. Yes. Okay.