Tyler Denk

We saw the scam they were taking off.

They had this massive referral program.

Everyone was raving about it.

And Austin Reif comes to me.

He's like, we're going to copy them and do it better than they do.

And so before I was even a full-time employee on contract, I built this referral program.

We were fined it a million times over and it was a massive success.

It led to over a million subscribers.

Wow.

That's a huge number.

Huge.

And people would reach out and I kid you not, maybe a thousand a week would reply to the email and be like, how did you build this referral program?

Like, what software are you using?

Like, how were you able to build this?

Because I want to do it for my newsletter.

And these were either independent journalists, writers, they worked at another company, but that was the signal of like, oh shit, what we built at Morning Grill was actually valuable because other people who had newsletters wanted what we had.

And one of the biggest hooks was that referral program.

And after being asked and forwarded emails hundreds of times through my days at Morning Brew, I was like, you know what?

I'm just going to write an article.

This is where my building in public started.