From Morning Brew to Smooth Media: Jenny Rothenberg’s Blueprint for Scaling the Creator Economy

Jenny Rothenberg, the COO of Smooth Media, an NYC-based agency representing knowledge creators. She is the ex-director of growth at Morning Brew. In this episode, the CEO of Smooth Media, Jenny Rothenberg shares her journey from Industry Dive and Morning Brew to founding her own media and agency powerhouse. Jenny reveals how she leveraged data-driven paid ads, referral programs, and strategic content repurposing to scale audiences and build thriving relationships with knowledge creators. She discusses pivotal lessons learned from growth experiments, from subway ad missteps to optimizing subscriber engagement and much more! Timestamps 01:00 – 01:30 Jenny discusses her early career at Industry Dive 01:30 – 02:00 Overview of Industry Dive’s B2B media publications 05:00 – 05:30 Transition to Jenny’s move to Morning Brew 07:30 – 08:00 Morning Brew’s growth strategy is outlined 09:00 – 09:30 Deep dive into using Facebook ads as a “golden ticket” for subscriber acquisition. 11:00 – 11:30 Exploration of Morning Brew’s referral program 12:30 – 13:00 Advice for new newsletter creators in 2025 on why a heavy paid acquisition model might not be ideal. 15:00 – 15:30 Recommendation to leverage free content platforms (LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram Reels) as top‐of‐funnel strategies. 16:00 – 16:30 Story of collaborating with creators (like Colin & Samir) to launch Publish Press for the creator economy. 17:30 – 18:00 Introduction of Smooth Media’s acquisition strategy 18:30 – 19:00 Defining “knowledge creators” and why Smooth Media focuses on creators who deliver educational, insightful content. 19:00 – 19:30 Best growth decision recap 20:00 – 10:30 Insights on repurposing content across channels and how to build an effective content marketing flywheel. 30:30 – 31:00 Discussion on hiring for growth roles Jenny’s Links  LDN– https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyrothenberg Website –  https://www.smoothmedia.co/ My Links  Podcast: https://lifeselfmastery.com/itunes Newsletter: https://partner-grow.beehiiv.com/subscribe YouTube:  youtube.com/lifeselfmastery Twitter: https://twitter.com/rohitmal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit857/ Agency: https://bit.ly/41YuNnx