Denk was the second employee at Morning Brew, then built his own newsletter platform. Looking back, he says the media companies that lasted had one thing in common: they owned their audience through email instead of renting it from search and social feeds.
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…you had like the rise of the newsletter culture to some degree with Axios and a bunch of the and Substack and a bunch of these different places. So tell me, as you're starting at Morning Brew, what did you learn about media at the time in the newsletter marketplace? What was interesting to you? I
…I was like a 22-year-old moving to New York for the first time. And like just trying to get my footing in like the world to have the ability to like try things, fail things, but learn and build and kind of find my own way was like really attractive to me. In retrospect, when you look at all of the successful media companies, whether it's Politico, Axios, The Skim, Morning Brew, The Hustle, like email was kind of that through line of like owning your audience and distribution in a time where a lot of other media brands leaned into Google search as being overly dependent on traffic or Facebook and the news feed. And that obviously didn't work out for a lot of those companies who have over-indexed in those channels. And weirdly enough, the least sexy tech of them all, which is like email, is the one that everyone is coming back to as the only way to really own your audience and that distribution. So yeah, I think I was more attracted to like the opportunity. In retrospect, I've learned a ton about media. We're obviously very involved with media. I think it's like a super interesting time now more than ever and was back then as well. But I think I was more interested in just like the startup experience and opportunity to wake up every day and choose myself what I could build. And…
Isn't it interesting? When you say everybody wanted to be Morning Brew for X and this to that, and you're, and we can get into you raising money for Beehive, but it's so funny because sometimes when you're existing in a new category, there isn't really X. Like you're Uber for X. You want to create…
Yeah. So I mentioned a bit when our writers at Morning Brew needed to create the newsletter. There was a very archaic process of copy and pasting content into like a document and then copy and pasting it to MailChimp. And I was like, we could build a better content management system to do that. And…
i sometimes think um you have to be crazy to be able to do it like you have to be a little bit you just had to be wired differently for someone for you to be working nights and weekends um for 10 months um and to go with this big vision and to sit in front of 40 people all who say no and you know…