The Line-by-Line Competitor Teardown
Print your newsletter and your best competitor's side by side every morning and argue line by line about which sentence is better.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 87%
Rief describes a practice at Morning Brew that he says he had never told Sam Parr about. Alex Lieberman was maniacal about editorial quality, so every single morning he would print out both Morning Brew and The Hustle, sit down, and go line by line comparing them. The team would argue over each line, that line is better, no our line is better, and Alex would adjudicate. They ran this for roughly six to nine months. Rief is candid about the cultural cost: when Alex judged that The Hustle's version of a story was better, some early Morning Brew employees genuinely hated Sam Parr for it, and there was what he calls a revolt in the office one morning because people insisted theirs was better. His retrospective read is that it often was not objectively better or worse, it was tailored to different people, but the discipline of daily forced comparison is what he credits alongside the write, grow, sell focus of 2018. Sean Puri corroborates the same behaviour from the other side, describing Sam showing the whole team a Morning Brew email and asking why it looked so much better than theirs, pointing at the formatting, the cleanliness, and the branding at the top of the email, which Sean read as respecting the craft so much that he could not fully hate the competitor.
Origin
Morning Brew and The Hustle launched within a year of each other in 2015 and 2016 and were constantly compared, so Alex Lieberman turned the rivalry into a daily editorial review rather than letting it stay an emotional grudge.
Core principles
- 01Compare at the sentence level, not at the vibe level
- 02Print it, because paper forces a slower and more literal read
- 03Do it daily so the comparison becomes routine rather than an event
- 04One person must adjudicate, or the team will always vote for itself
- 05Respect the craft enough to concede when the rival wrote it better
How to run it
- 1
Choose one rival worth studying
Pick the competitor you genuinely respect on craft rather than the one you find easiest to dismiss. Morning Brew picked The Hustle precisely because Alex believed there was a period where The Hustle's copy had passed theirs.
Watch out The default startup instinct, as Sean describes it, is to say a competitor sucks. That reflex is exactly what makes this exercise valuable and uncomfortable.
- 2
Print both issues every morning
Alex printed out Morning Brew and The Hustle every single morning. The physical printout is deliberate, since it slows the read down and makes it possible to sit down together over the same page.
Pro tip Make it part of the morning routine right after the send, so it happens before the day's work absorbs everyone.
- 3
Go line by line and argue each one
Work sentence by sentence rather than forming a general impression. The team's argument, that line is better, no ours is better, is the mechanism, because it forces people to articulate why a specific construction works.
Watch out Rief admits this caused a revolt in the office one morning when people were told the rival's line was better. Expect real friction.
- 4
Let one person adjudicate honestly
Alex made the call on which line was better, including when the answer was the rival's. Without a single honest adjudicator the exercise collapses into the team reassuring itself.
Pro tip Separate the adjudication from the writer's ego by focusing the verdict on the sentence, never on the person.
- 5
Extend the teardown to format and brand
Sam's version of this looked beyond copy at the formatting, the cleanliness and the branding at the top of the email, showing the whole team and asking why the rival's email looked so much better. Layout is as comparable as prose.
Pro tip Sean's read was that this level of respect for craft is what stops a competitive comparison from curdling into pure resentment.
- 6
Run it for months, then stop
Morning Brew ran the daily teardown for about six to nine months. Treat it as an intensive training period that recalibrates the team's standard, not a permanent fixture that keeps you anchored to a rival forever.
Watch out Run indefinitely, it risks turning your product into a reaction to someone else's rather than its own thing.
In the wild
For roughly six to nine months Alex printed Morning Brew and The Hustle every morning and the team went line by line through both. When Alex judged that The Hustle's version of a story they had both covered was better, early Morning Brew employees were furious, and one morning it triggered what Rief calls a revolt in the office.
→ Rief credits the period as the most hyperfocused of his life alongside write, grow, sell, and Morning Brew went on to a business doing around $75 million of revenue.
Sean Puri recalls being in Sam Parr's office expecting the usual dismissal of a competitor, and instead watching Sam show the whole team a Morning Brew email and ask why it looked so much better than The Hustle's, pointing at the top of the email, the formatting and the cleanliness.
→ Sean read it as Sam respecting the craft so much he could not fully hate the competitor, and the team absorbed the specific design elements rather than a vague instruction to improve.
Common mistakes
Dismissing the competitor instead of studying them
Sean describes the normal startup posture of saying most people suck, especially anyone doing what you do. That reflex protects morale and destroys the only free source of calibration you have.
Comparing overall impressions rather than lines
A general judgment that a rival is doing well produces no change. The value comes from the specific sentence, headline or layout choice you can name, argue about and copy tomorrow.
Ignoring the morale cost of the verdict
Rief is explicit that some employees hated the competitor and that there was a revolt when the rival's line won. Running this without preparing the team turns a craft exercise into a loyalty test.
Is it for you?
Best for
Content and editorial teams whose product quality is the differentiator and who have a credible direct rival to benchmark against
Not ideal for
Teams without a genuine peer competitor, or cultures too fragile to survive being publicly told a rival wrote it better
From the transcript
“Alex in particular was maniacal about this he would print out morning brew and the hustle every single morning we just go line by line…”
“we printed out your newsletter every day and read through it for I don't know 6 months nine months like we were just so focused”
“he just respects the the actual like craft so much that he can't even hate him fully”
From the episode
Austin Rief: Building Morning Brew, The Ultimate Guide to Building Newsletter Businesses, Side Hustle Ideas, & More
Austin Rief