On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices, we hear from Paul Ostwald, co-founder of Morningcrunch, a German-language media brand aimed at young professionals. Since launching in summer 2023, they’ve grown to the point that their newsletters now go out to over 50,000 young professionals every morning.
Morningcrunch is ad-funded, and Paul explains how he’s working with a German media house to bring in bigger deals. He also talks about how he’s taken inspiration from newsletter outfits that have far bigger budgets for A/B testing, why younger people still care about email, and the importance of building trust as a start-up.
Here are some highlights from the interview, lightly edited for clarity:
Creating a newsletter-first brand
Morningcrunch is a media brand that’s directed at young professionals in Germany, and we serve them with daily briefings, daily newsletters that go up at 6am five days a week, that’s the core of it. If you dig deep, you would find them on an online archive, but they’re not really geared towards online readers. We really try and focus the whole brand on newsletter-first, and newsletter-only currently.
We’ve taken inspiration from those who have big budgets to A/B test and find out what works. We’ve taken inspiration from Axios, from Morning Brew, from quite a few news brands that my co-founder and I read ourselves.
It’s all in German. We lead out to sources that are not German, so the international ones, because they often have coverage that’s just a bit better. But the German aspect is really interesting, because there’s no German media brand really trying to approach that audience in a language that they speak themselves, so with all the abbreviations, we’re not 100% German in that sense, we have a lot of English words that we slip in…because if you go onto German streets and talk to people, that’s how people speak.
We’re trying to emulate that, rather than making it a German language product just for the sake of it.
Younger audiences care about email
[Young people] do actually care about newsletters, which we didn’t know when we set out. We now have 50,000 subscribers, and they open at a 50-55% open rate, which for us is pretty good.
I think the reason for that is most people have switched off notifications from basically everything except email and WhatsApp. Maybe it depends on the country, but in Germany at least, those are the two, and there’s not a lot of competition for young audiences on the email side of things. I think that’s worked out pretty well for us, to be honest.
We tried to find out whether WhatsApp would be the next channel to go into, because we thought it’s the most intuitive, most native format, especially for young audiences. But we actually found that most people don’t want it there because it’s already cluttered, and they prefer not to have another unread WhatsApp chat there, so we’ve stayed with email.
Building trust as a start-up
What’s so interesting is the declining trust for some of the big media brands, but a few select ones have managed to sustain the high levels of trust that they’ve always held. We have very strong public broadcasters in Germany that have high trust levels, we have a few select titles that are doing really well, but at the same time, I think there are not a lot of brands that are very trusted among younger readers.
We’re nowhere near close to done with that. We’ve been going for a year now, and I think part of building trust is transparency. So we’re very transparent about when we make mistakes, transparent about who we are, the people behind the newsletter, all these things. That’s helping us build that trust, but it’s definitely the hardest part.
One thing we do a lot is to have feedback sessions with the readers and audiences, and be transparent about outcomes. So when we ask, did you guys enjoy reading our top stories in the last three months, and we get a mediocre result, we’ll also flag that in the newsletter and say, we’ll try better.
There’s so much to it, but it also comes down to granular things like making sure you don’t have spelling mistakes, making sure you cite sources where they should be. All these things add up to a feeling of trust and mistrust.
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