Write Grow Sell and the Great Wall of Opens
Compress the business into three verbs and one daily number written on a physical wall, so every person knows what the main thing is.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
In 2018 Rief says he had never been as hyperfocused in his life. Morning Brew reduced the entire company to three words written on the wall, write, grow, sell, and he woke up every day repeating them. Alongside that they ran the Great Wall of Opens: at 11:00 a.m. every single day they took the open rate and wrote it on the wall by hand, and they kept that up for roughly two years running. Sean Puri independently confirms the pattern from Monkey Inferno, where he papered walls with sayings and posters, and says one of the highest predictors of founder success he ever saw was simply whether a founder knew what the main thing was. His stronger point is that knowing a generic mantra is not enough. You have to translate it into the specific number you write down every day, and then commit to doing something about it when the number is bad and doubling down when it is good. Sean's failure diagnosis is founders he would ask at 3 p.m. how many customers they got that day, who had to go check the database, which told him they would fail. Rief pairs the ritual with the underlying arithmetic: if they grew 50,000 subscribers every month and costs did not change, they would go from $50,000 to $75,000 to $100,000 to $125,000 of monthly revenue and end the year at a million subs doing a million dollars a month, a model investors told them made no sense.
Origin
Rief and Alex Lieberman were operating Morning Brew out of an office with almost no money and no infrastructure, so they wrote the mantra and the daily open rate directly on the office wall rather than building any reporting system.
Core principles
- 01The main thing must be nameable in three words or fewer
- 02A mantra is worthless until it becomes one number you write down daily
- 03The number goes somewhere physical and public, not in a dashboard nobody opens
- 04A bad number obliges an action the same day, a good number obliges a doubling down
- 05The arithmetic of compounding one number is more persuasive than any narrative
How to run it
- 1
Name the main thing in three verbs
Reduce the entire business to the smallest possible set of verbs. For Morning Brew it was write, grow, sell. If you cannot compress it, you have not decided what the business is yet.
Pro tip Put it on the wall, not in a deck. Rief says they literally wrote it on the wall and said it every day.
- 2
Translate the mantra into one daily number
Sean's insistence is that a mantra alone is generic. Pick the specific number that proves the main thing is working. For Morning Brew, open rate was the proxy for the whole business, since it captured whether the writing was good and whether growth was real subscribers.
Watch out If you cannot state the number by mid-afternoon without querying a database, Sean's read is that you are going to fail.
- 3
Fix a time and a physical surface
Morning Brew took the number at 11:00 a.m. every single day and wrote it on the Great Wall of Opens. The fixed time removes negotiation, and the physical wall makes the trend visible to everyone who walks past.
Pro tip The wall builds a visible history. Rief ran it for around two years, which turns a metric into a shared narrative of the company.
- 4
React to the number the same day
Sean's framing is that daily work is organised around this one number: if it is bad you do something about it, if it is good you double down on whatever caused it. The ritual only earns its keep if it changes what the team does that afternoon.
Watch out Recording without reacting turns the wall into decoration and quietly teaches the team that the number does not matter.
- 5
Run the compounding model out loud
Rief modelled that 50,000 new subscribers a month with flat costs took them from $50,000 monthly revenue toward a million subscribers doing a million a month within the year. Boiling it down to an Excel model made the daily grind feel mechanical rather than hopeful.
Pro tip Expect outsiders to reject the model. Investors told Rief it made no sense, and his answer was that he was just looking at the Excel.
In the wild
Every day at 11:00 a.m. someone at Morning Brew pulled the open rate and wrote it on the office wall by hand. It ran for roughly two years without interruption, and Rief describes 2018 as the most hyperfocused he has ever been, waking up each day to write, grow, sell.
→ Morning Brew grew into a business doing around $75 million of revenue with double-digit profit margins and 250 people, and sold a majority stake at roughly a $70 million valuation.
Sean Puri would ask founders in his office at 3 p.m. how many new customers they had that day and what the revenue was. They would say let me check, then go into the database. Even after they built a dashboard they still had to look it up rather than already knowing it.
→ Sean concluded those founders were going to fail because they had no mechanism for keeping the main thing the main thing, and says knowing the main number was one of the highest predictors of founder success he observed.
Common mistakes
Stopping at the slogan
Sean's specific criticism is that even founders who can state a generic main thing fail to translate it into the one number they write down daily. Write, grow, sell without the Great Wall of Opens is a poster, not an operating system.
Hiding the number in a database or dashboard
If reading the number requires a query or a login, nobody checks it hourly, and the daily reaction loop never forms. The wall is deliberately low-tech so the number is unavoidable.
Picking a number that does not represent the main thing
The metric has to be the honest proxy for the business. Morning Brew chose open rate because it caught both content quality and growth quality at once, whereas a vanity total would have hidden a decaying list.
Is it for you?
Best for
Small founding teams who need everyone pointed at the same metric without a management layer
Not ideal for
Complex multi-product businesses where no single number honestly represents progress
From the transcript
“I woke up every day write grow sell right like we wrote it on the wall and at 11:00 a.m. every single day we had…”
“whenever I would meet founders one of the highest predictors of success was do they even know what the main thing is”
“they didn't understand to translate that into the Great Wall of opens is the number we're going to write down every day”
From the episode
Austin Rief: Building Morning Brew, The Ultimate Guide to Building Newsletter Businesses, Side Hustle Ideas, & More
Austin Rief