The Hub-and-Spoke Distribution Model
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Alex Lieberman's mental model for growing Morning Brew from zero readers to a national college audience. Picture a bicycle wheel: the spokes are the individual people you want as readers, and the hub is any person or channel that already has the attention of hundreds of those spokes. Rather than convincing readers one at a time, you win hubs — professors, club presidents, campus influencers — and let each one deliver a room full of spokes. Once you have saturated the hubs you can personally reach, you replicate yourself by recruiting local operators at every other hub location, then design that ambassador funnel for volume rather than prestige, gating your own time behind proof of results. The mechanism is leverage per conversation, plus deliberately absorbing signup friction yourself so conversion stays high.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Define your spokes precisely
Write down exactly who should read or buy the thing. For Morning Brew this was college business students, not 'anyone interested in business'. The narrower the spoke definition, the easier it is to spot the hubs that already aggregate them.
Pro tip If you cannot name the room your spokes are already sitting in, the definition is still too broad.
- 2
Map the hubs that own their attention
List the people and channels that have standing access to large groups of your spokes. On campus that meant teachers with classes of 75-500 students and club presidents with 50-250 members. Each hub is one conversation that reaches hundreds.
Watch out Hubs are not always institutions — a creator whose audience overlaps yours is a hub too.
- 3
Pitch hubs in person with a two-minute appeal
Ask for a slot in the class or meeting and deliver a short pitch: what the product is, why it is the best of its kind, that it is free, and that unsubscribing is one click with no hard feelings. Alex and his co-founder did roughly 150 of these in one semester.
Pro tip Lead with the downside-removal ('it's free, unsubscribe any time') — it kills the main objection before it forms.
- 4
Absorb the friction yourself
Pass around a pad and pen for email addresses instead of asking people to open a laptop and navigate to a website. Two steps for them, five or six steps for you. Type the addresses in manually afterwards.
Pro tip Count the literal number of actions your prospect must take, and move every removable one onto your own to-do list.
Watch out This only works at small scale — it is a launch tactic, not a system.
- 5
Clone yourself at hubs you cannot physically reach
Once your home market is saturated, the question becomes: how do we find our equivalents at every other location? That is the ambassador program — local operators who run the same hub pitch on your behalf.
Watch out Do not recruit for prestige. The most involved students on campus were the ones with the least available time and the program failed.
- 6
Run the ambassador funnel for quantity, gate your time behind proof
Accept everyone who applies but keep an air of exclusivity, then automate the onboarding: a drive of marketing collateral, a script for what to say in classes, printable signup sheets. Only ambassadors who hit a threshold — 25 signups — earned live contact with the founders.
Pro tip Automating the top of the funnel means your scarcest resource, founder attention, is only spent on people who have already produced results.
In the wild
In their second semester of senior year at Michigan, Alex and co-founder Austin spent the entire term walking into roughly 150 club meetings and classes. Each visit was a two-minute pitch on why Morning Brew was the best business newsletter in the world, that it was free, and that unsubscribing carried no penalty. They then passed a pad and pen around the room and typed every handwritten address in themselves afterwards, because handwriting an email converted far better than asking a room to open laptops and navigate to a website.
→ Roughly 2,500 to 5,000 subscribers from the Michigan market alone, and about 10,000 by graduation.
The first ambassador program used a rigorous application and accepted only 15 campus influencers — and it failed, because the most involved students had spread themselves too thin to commit. The rebuild went to the opposite extreme: everyone who applied was accepted, but received an automated email framing them as one of a select few, followed by automated onboarding with a Google Drive of collateral, a class script and printable signup sheets. Only ambassadors who reached 25 signups got put into a group with the founders.
→ 250 ambassadors across 200 schools, with founder time reserved for proven performers.
Common mistakes
Recruiting the most impressive people as ambassadors
The campus stars — club leaders, class presidents, front-row students — are already over-committed and have the worst time management. Impressiveness on paper is negatively correlated with available hours, which is exactly what an ambassador role consumes.
Making the prospect do the signup work
Asking a room to pull out a laptop, open a browser, type a URL and enter an email is five or six steps, and conversion collapses. Every step you refuse to absorb is a step where people drop out.
Going straight to spokes instead of hubs
Convincing readers one by one is linear work. If you have not first asked who already has standing access to hundreds of your target readers, you are spending the same effort for a fraction of the reach.
From the transcript
“the way that we thought about growing our thing was the the visual i have is like a bicycle”
“spokes are all of the people that we think should read morning brew so those are college business students hubs are the people that are…”
“the reason we passed around a pad and a paper is because the conversion rate of people writing down their email on a pad was…”
From the episode
Lessons From Selling Morning Brew For $75 Million At 28 - Alex Lieberman
Alex Lieberman