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How German-language newsletter start-up Morningcrunch built an audience of 50,000 young professionals in just 12 months

If you were planning a daily news publication to target younger audiences, your starting point might be TikTok or WhatsApp. But after just 12 months, 50,000 young professionals in Germany are beginning their day with an email newsletter. Morningcrunch, delivering a mix of colloquial content and clever curation, is proving email is a thing even for Gen Z.

Morningcrunch is a year-old media brand targeting young professionals in Germany with 6am business briefings five days a week. You can find Morningcrunch content online if you really want to but that’s not the point, according to co-founder Paul Ostwald. “We’re not geared towards online readers,” he explains. “We really try to focus the whole brand on newsletter first…newsletter only.”

And despite what we might think about younger people’s dismissal of email, Morningcrunch’s audience of 25 to 35-year olds care about newsletters. “We now have 50,000 subscribers with a 50% to 55% open rate,” Paul told a recent episode of The Publisher Podcast. 

He thinks the popularity of the newsletter is driven, at least in part, by information overload on other platforms. “We tried to find out whether WhatsApp would be the next channel to go into. We thought it was the most intuitive, the most native format, especially for young audiences, But we actually found that most people don’t want news there. They already have 50 unanswered messages from their cousin and their grandpa.”

Inspirational A/B testing

The Morningcrunch style and format will look familiar to anyone that’s read a newsletter from Axios or Morning Brew and Paul is not shy of acknowledging their influence. “We’ve taken inspiration from those who have big budgets to A/B test and find out what works,” he explains.

What’s unique about Morningcrunch is its German content, but also its German context. “It’s not just language, it’s the whole context of language,” says Paul. “It’s the references, it’s the humour. We’ve plugged YouTube videos to German ads, TV ads from the early 2000s or 2010s, where we know people have grown up with these ads and know them.”

He believes that’s the power of writing in German for a German-speaking audience, “People immediately feel like they are reading a message from a friend,” he says.

Morningcrunch’s audience works across a range of industries, from finance to manufacturing. “It’s actually quite a broad audience,” Paul says. “I think that’s because we try to use as little jargon as possible. That kind of resonates with a broader audience.”

The newsletter opens with a light-hearted introduction, moving on to stocks data, which Paul describes as ‘not extraordinary, but nice to have’. It then has two top stories told in a newsletter style popularised by Axios and Morning Brew where brevity is a big deal, as are bullet points, memes and emojis.

“We’re not 100% German in that sense,” he explains, “We have a lot of English words that we slip in. We have sections like ‘By the numbers’, then we’ll continue in German. If you go onto German streets, that’s how people speak. We’re trying to emulate that.”

Paul sees similar style newsletters in English, but not in German. “I don’t think there’s any German media brand that tries to do what we do. There are quite a few in the English-speaking industry. So I think that’s what gives us a bit of an edge.”

Learning from mistakes

Of course, there have been misfires along the way. “It sometimes goes awfully wrong,” admits Paul. “Sometimes you put in stuff that no one cares about, features we thought were really neat, really cool, and we just had no resonance.” He gives the example of a jobs section where the jobs were listed in a humorous way. “People thought it was funny, but no one applied,” he laughs.

Metrics are crucial, but Paul says the Morningcrunch audience is also ‘super helpful’ when it comes to understanding what works and what doesn’t. The team regularly runs reader polls. “We get very blunt, but very helpful feedback all the time,” Paul says.

When it comes to growing its audience, Morningcrunch has tried a few tactics. A referral program where readers could get a Patagonia ‘finance bro’ vest if they referred 50 subscribers worked well.

Influencers with substantial social reach but no newsletter of their own also delivered. “We had a deal with them, a commission-based deal,” Paul explains. “They’re sending people to a high-value product and we’re getting people who are interested in influencers who are usually finance-affiliated.”

Q&A platform Quora was also useful in generating qualified referrals, both organically and paid. “People who ask questions on Quora on finance topics are probably also interested in getting a daily newsletter on finance and business.”

Although it launched without advertisers, Morningcrunch was conceived as being totally ad funded. “We always thought, if we managed to get a good audience and a sizable one, there will be people who will want to advertise there,” Paul says.

One year in, the hunch has been proved right, with sponsorship sold directly and through a third-party sales agency who sells the newsletter as part of a bundle with adjacent products from some of the bigger German publishers.

“What our advertising partner does for us is basically sell our ad space together with the ad space in other, bigger finance publications. The bundle is big enough for the large clients to actually say, ‘Let’s book four months in all of those finance newsletters’.”

Trust us, we’re a start-up

Morningcrunch is already looking to what’s next. Continuing audience development is the central priority, but launching into niche verticals towards the end of 2024 is also part of the plan. “We have waitlists live for ‘Markets Crunch’, ‘Deals Crunch’ and ‘AI Crunch’,” says Paul.

Building trust is also a big focus. “I don’t think there are a lot of brands that are very trusted among younger readers,” Paul says. “Building up that trust takes time… we’re nowhere close to being done with that.”

For Paul, a big part of establishing trust is going ‘granular’ to get the basics right. “Making sure you don’t have spelling mistakes, making sure you cite sources. All these things add up to a feeling of trust and mistrust.”

Transparency is also crucial. He says, “We’re very transparent about when we make mistakes, transparent about who we are. When we ask, did you guys enjoy reading our top stories in the last three months and we get a mediocre result, we’ll definitely also flag that in the newsletter and say, ‘we’ll try better’.”

Although he doesn’t like the phrase, Paul says Morningcrunch is on a ‘bit of a journey’ with its users. “I think that’s part of why we can just try out stuff and people don’t immediately unsubscribe,” he notes.

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