Creator Spotlight: Jake Robinson author of Morning Huddle

After 14+ years playing fantasy football, Jake Robinson started what he’d always wanted: an independent, daily fantasy newsletter summarizing the most important insights from the previous day, packed with memes, highlights and stats. 

While in law school, Jake started a fantasy football business (draftwithredzone.com). After COVID crushed demand (requires groups of 10+), Jake was brainstorming ways to build awareness for next season. He recognized the importance of building a subscriber base, but didn’t have one and wasn’t sure where to start. Twitter? Saturated. Podcast? Saturated. YouTube? HD cameras and editing were too expensive and complicated. 

But a newsletter? Interesting.

An avid reader of the Morning Brew, Jake recognized the benefits of a newsletter that curates the best content to help readers find what they need to know. Why wouldn’t this same approach apply to fantasy football, which is played by 70+ million people around the world? So, instead of studying for his construction law exam, Jake started the Morning Huddle.

He quickly noticed that there wasn’t one fantasy football newsletter that acted as a daily news round-up. Most pushed their own content, rather than highlighting the work of the best creators in the industry. Like picking stocks, fantasy football is won through information and fantasy footballers were hungry for more. 

After writing the first edition, Jake posted it on a fantasy football reddit forum, where it went viral. The newsletter literally grew overnight from the five friends Jake had forced to sign up to over 2,000 subscribers. It’s since grown to the point that Jake is sending out almost 250,000 emails per month and added some stellar team members. That’s despite $0 on paid advertising and all subscribers arriving solely through word of mouth and forum posts. 

The #1 focus of the Morning Huddle is helping subscribers win their fantasy league, and it’s working. In addition to providing a detailed summary of the fantasy football news, the newsletter contains links for readers to dive deeper into content most interesting to them. One subscriber’s feedback: "Humorous, great news updates, strong cases for each player you explore and your aggregation of relevant links to other sites and blogs that will help are second to none." 

Another: “I love the humor, and how you spin it around fantasy! I truly love opening my tablet and finding your letter in my inbox! Thank you! I'm sure one day, you'll be picked up and distributed by somebody big.”

We spoke with Jake about scaling Morning Huddle using beehiiv features and helping fantasy footballers win their league.

The Newsletter: The Morning Huddle

Team members: Jake Robinson, Eddie Ciardullo, Matt Haage, Coach Wehler.

Top posts to check out:

🏈 Preseason Week 1: Risers & Fallers: Everything you need to know from the first preseason action. (https://morninghuddle.beehiiv.com/p/preseason-week-1-risers-fallers) 

🏈 A young Tyreek Hill? & old Julio Jones (https://morninghuddle.beehiiv.com/p/next-tyreek-hill)

Tell me about the Morning Huddle!

The Morning Huddle is an (almost) daily newsletter that finds & summarizes the best fantasy football articles, advice and memes into a 3-minute morning read. We dive into every corner of the fantasy football world to ensure subscribers know what they need to win their leagues. And we like to have fun, injecting humor throughout every edition. 

Let’s talk about your growth

We started our newsletter on August 1, 2022 and went from 10 subscribers to 10k subscribers by August 31st. I started the newsletter by just sending it to 10 of my friends/family members and letting them know that they could unsubscribe if they wanted to but was really just trying to test things out and find our voice for the publication. 

I spent a lot of time reading on fantasy football and with the season approaching, I was on a fantasy football thread on reddit and decided to drop the link to the newsletter. I started instantly getting a ton of subscribers and realized that there’s an audience that will happily subscribe and engage in fantasy football content. So I started taking it more seriously, putting out content almost daily and just hit our 10k milestone. I decided to build out a referral program and got about 160 new referrals the same day. 

What are your plans for monetizing? 

In the past we’ve mostly monetized using ads. We worked with some pretty great advertisers last year including Overtime. We specifically work with advertisers that fit in with the audience and something we believe in or use ourselves.

This year we're looking to get more partnerships. Our goal is to hit 8k/month in revenue but more importantly to lock in long time partnerships and build relationships with our advertisers. 

What have been some of your biggest takeaways from starting the newsletter

Something I learned pretty early on was that if we drop a players name in the title of the post, it’ll have a lower open rate. So it was interesting to see that when we have a more general title, the engagement overall was higher. This is likely because if a reader isn’t interested in that specific player, they likely won’t engage with the post at all.

Where were your prior to beehiiv and what made you want to move over? 

I was writing on Substack. I was always a Morning Brew fan and was following Tyler’s progress on beehiiv pretty closely. I was seeing tremendous growth early on and really wanted to be a part of what was being built. Haven’t looked back since. 

Favorite beehiiv feature

Do I have to choose one? 

First, the template and editor features are incredible and have saved me 66 hours per NFL season (I did the math) – that’s 2.75 DAYS of my life, saved thanks to Beehiiv.

Second, the support of Tyler and the team is second to none. Whether it’s assisting with the transition from Substack to setting up integrations across the web, they’ve been there for us the entire journey. 

Third (I’ll cap it here), the optionality is second to none. Referral program. We’ve seen such tremendous success here and has been a huge part of our growth. 

Premium memberships? Yup. Customized templates for each day of the week, you bet. With new features almost weekly, using Beehiiv is like running a newsletter empire with a team of the world’s best programmers constantly making your life easier. Imagine having access to the same tools newsletters like the Morning Brew have for 1/10000th of the cost. With Beehiiv, we can. 

How do you see newsletters fitting into the news space? 

Newsletters are changing how we consume content. People want to wake up to something friendly, something familiar. More and more newsletters are following the Morning Brew’s lead and adding personality to their writing to address this. The best writers in the world are also trending towards a newsletter-centric approach, as it allows them to directly interact with their audience without a central third-party gatekeeper. 

A well-written newsletter feels like a conversation, not a chore. Traditional media will always have its place, today’s climate feels overwhelming. Forcing readers to determine what is important from an enormous array of content is not the future. The best newsletters compile the critical few stories from the ever-changing news cycle and provide their readers with an enjoyable experience while keeping them on top of everything they need to know.

Tell me about the lack of independent, daily fantasy football newsletters. How does the Morning Huddle address this gap?

Fantasy football is an enormous industry and filled with incredible analysts. The typical fantasy football newsletter consists of one website pushing their own content. Their content is great, of course, but there’s something missing. Rather than limit ourselves to one website, we source from every fantasy football analyst, website and podcast, to find the best content for our subscribers. Then we package it into a digestible read with links for subscribers to dive deeper into certain topics. We’ve more than doubled each year because there is nothing like this in the world. 

2022 Goals

For Morning Huddle, we want to at least double our subscribers each NFL season. That said, since we’ve joined Beehiiv, the benefits of SEO and a clean interface has led to us already almost doubling our subscribers this season. So, we’re setting our goals higher. We want to be sending 500,000 monthly emails by seasons end, double what we’re currently sending. 

Advice for other writers

Find your audience. Of course, the newsletter should be the best product on the market, but it won’t matter if your audience has never heard of you. If you want to get your first 10,000 subscribers, you have to be where they are. This is much easier if you’re already a member of the community your newsletter targets. Ask yourself: where do I search for this type of content? Go interact with the community, ask them how you can improve the newsletter and show them how your newsletter solves a problem for them.

This strategy alone accounted for 80% of our almost 10,000 subscribers. 

Want More? 

Make sure to subscribe to Morning Huddle here!