This Newsletter Sold For $75 Million

+ 11 AI tools you can't live without in 2025

Author

Shailesh Shakya
January 27, 2025

The gold standard of business news

Morning Brew is transforming the way working professionals consume business news.

They skip the jargon and lengthy stories, and instead serve up the news impacting your life and career with a hint of wit and humor. This way, you’ll actually enjoy reading the news—and the information sticks.

Best part? Morning Brew’s newsletter is completely free. Sign up in just 10 seconds and if you realize that you prefer long, dense, and boring business news—you can always go back to it.

Two college students, Austin and Alex, turned a simple idea into a $75 million media empire. Their weapon? A daily business newsletter called Morning Brew, designed to make business news actually enjoyable for students.

Here's how they scaled from zero to over 5 million subscribers:

Alex Lieberman, a senior at the University of Michigan, started writing. His first subscriber? His grandma. "I asked my grandma if she wanted to subscribe, and she said yes," Alex recalls. Austin, an early reader, quickly joined forces.

Alex and Austin realized that was too complicated for busy students. Instead, they went guerilla. Before every single lecture, they'd personally hand out sign-up sheets, collecting a whopping 500 emails per class. Boom! 15,000 subscribers.

Next, they recruited friends at other universities (Penn State, NYU, etc.) to replicate the strategy. An army of brand ambassadors was born. They hit 50,000 subscribers and realized they were onto something huge.

They launched a killer referral program. The rewards? Everything from an exclusive Sunday newsletter (3 referrals) to Morning Brew swag like stickers, phone wallets, T-shirts, and even a trip to HQ (1,000 referrals).

Austin and Alex realized ads in other newsletters performed best. They doubled down, buying ads where their audience already hung out.

By now, over 300,000 people had referred at least one friend. The newsletter was growing itself. They expanded into podcasts and short-form video.

In 2020, Business Insider acquired a majority stake for a cool $75 million.

Key Takeaways

  • Start small, dream big

  • Don't give up when things get tough, iterate on your strategy.

  • Build a loyal audience, and they'll do the marketing for you.

Morning Brew's story proves that with hustle, smart strategy, and a little help from grandma, anyone can build a media empire.

Now here are 9 tools…

9 AI Tools You Can't Live Without In 2025

Invideo: When it comes to creating faceless videos that often goes viral on YouTube, then use Invideo. One of the best generative video generation AI tool that takes text as a prompt and turn it into a Ultra HD faceless video in 2 minutes. It can even add the background music and captions.

HeyGen: This tool creates custom AI avatars from a 5-minute video of you speaking. You upload the video to HeyGen, and it creates an AI avatar in about an hour. You can create videos without having to be in front of the camera, and sells this as a service.

11 Labs: This tool creates AI voice avatars. After you upload 1-2 hours of your audio, the tool generates an AI model of your voice. The more audio you feed into the model (ideally 10+ hours) the better it becomes. You can combine 11 Labs with HeyGen to create video reels.

Sunno AI: This tool generates custom background music and soundtracks, avoiding copyright issues. You can use this to create music for your videos, and solves the problem of demonetization from copyright infringement on platforms like YouTube.

Notebook LM: Google's Notebook LM summarizes blogs, videos, and documents including PDFs. It can also generate an audio podcast summarizing the content using two voices. You can use it when traveling to understand content without having to read it. It can also answer questions about the content, giving a deeper insight into books or PDFs.

Claude: This tool, built by Anthropic, is great for coding and computer use. It has a "computer use" functionality in which you can ask it to do tasks in a sandbox environment. The 3.5 Sonet model can create code snippets or entire programs based on natural language descriptions. It is compared to Pythagora AI, which is a more advanced tool for creating code. However, Claude is helpful even without knowing how to code.

Omi: This is an AI hardware device that is worn like a pendant and connects to a phone app. Omi records conversations, distinguishes speakers, and provides summaries of meetings and discussions. You are able to ask questions about the discussion and get answers and that it can also turn summaries into tables and other formats.

Instantly and Apollo: These tools are used for cold outreach marketing. Apollo creates lists of ideal customer profiles, and Instantly automates personalized emails to these potential clients. You can these tools to save time, scale efforts.

Flux AI: This tool generates ultra-realistic images, and the presenter notes that they are often indistinguishable from real pictures. It is useful for creating social media content, thumbnails, and banners, among other things.

Perplexity: This tool is used for AI search, and it provides real-time results that are more up-to-date than Google searches. You can use Perplexity instead of Google when seeking current information.

OpenAI Sora: This tool is a revolutionary tool for video editors because of its storyboarding feature. It allows users to describe particular frames and then stitches them together to make a complete scene.

Google Veo: This tool is introduce by Google has capability to create Ultra realistic 4K videos in minutes. I found it much better than OpenAI’s SORA.

New Tools Coming in 2025

AI Agents (Google Mariner, OpenAI Swamp, Agent Force by salesforce): AI agents are on the rise, and Google, OpenAI, and Salesforce are working on these tools.

Google Mariner allows users to type in tasks, such as finding the cheapest flight, and it will execute the task automatically.

AI agents can be used to automate many tasks such as marketing, HR, accounting, and sales.

Thanks for being here!

Shailesh & OpenAILearning team