Building in Public, Growing 55% MoM, & Quick Adaptability to Compete with Big Tech, with Tyler Denk

Tyler, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I appreciate the time. And with Beehive, just to kind of level set for people, what are you doing with this company today, Tyler?

Yeah, so we are trying to build a platform to help you build, scale, monetize a newsletter. And yeah, just trying to make people more successful in the creator economy.

It's been all over. I feel like if you're on Twitter at all, in terms of people jumping on Beehive, big newsletters on Beehive, a lot to talk about with this. I wanna go back to the early days though. Why start this in the first place, Tyler?

Yeah, I feel like I've told this story, but happy to dive in. So I was an early employee back at Morning Brew, the second employee back in 2017. Classic wearing multiple different hats. So came in, I was the only engineer for the first 2 years, so built the website, the email newsletter, the referral program that led to over a million subscribers. I built a content management system to help the writers create that content that goes into the newsletter. Partially in being naive and 23 years old, we built it from scratch. Also, a lot of CMSs are built primarily for web. And so building something as a newsletter-focused media entity was very different. And so we built a CMS and then we built an ad management platform which facilitated all the different ad placements going into the newsletters. We eventually had 5 or 6 different newsletters, 2 to 3 advertisers per newsletter. So having a sales team manage 40 to 50 advertisement placements per week was a lot. So built a platform that integrated with the rest of our ecosystem. It's a long way of saying built a lot of this internal tech. Everything at Morning Brew was pretty custom built for our own needs. And being able to see what a well-oiled machine looked like to build and scale this newsletter was like really amazing. And it helped facilitate a lot of our growth and success. And so when a bunch of other newsletter operators, media companies would reach out to us being like, I'm copy and pasting content from my WordPress site to Mailchimp and it doesn't really work well, but I also kind of want a referral program and I don't understand who my audience is. There's all these different pieces to the ecosystem that don't necessarily play well together. Meanwhile, we kind of cracked the code internally. And so being able to build a platform that facilitated that growth, the audience insights, the content creation, the monetization all under one roof, I think is like very advantageous for content creators and for publishers. And so that's kind of the premise of Beehive.

One thing I wanna go back to, I heard that intro. I appreciate you sharing that again for people who maybe have not heard that story before, but going back to that, even those times, I had read an article or something you posted about like, basically, you came into Morning Brew, was like, yeah, grow the newsletter, like find a way you have a lot of autonomy, it seems like in terms of doing that. How'd you even approach that in terms of when you started thinking about growing Morning Brew's newsletter? I know some of the things you've talked about you guys did, but what was your process for that even? Or what you were thinking about initially having so much autonomy to be like, look, I can go figure this out. Take me through that a little bit.

Yeah, it was like no bullshit, no wasting time on things that weren't going to move the needle. So like, I wasn't building fun widgets or poking around building night mode for our readers. It was, is whatever I'm spending time on today going to lead to more subscribers? And so very first project I ever built initially on contract was creating the social share icons under each story. It was basically, I mean, The Skimm came before us. They did that in a few other newsletters and we didn't have that initially. And so the theory, obviously we have 100,000 subscribers. If we can make the readers share to Facebook, share to Twitter, share to LinkedIn, or email to someone else, will that expand the reach? And like, we proved that hypothesis, as you would expect, to be correct. But like, that's like a perfect example of something that we felt would expand the reach of Morning Brew. So I built that. Then we would find out from a lot of our readers that they were finding out about us through their friends and colleagues who were also reading the newsletter. And so there was already sharing happening organically without the incentives. And so that was a no-brainer, like how do we build a referral program and then optimize the hell out of it? So it's one thing to have the section in the newsletter and like the referral hub.

Yeah.

The amount of like automated emails and A/B testing we did in the background of, okay, they, we did a nudge thing where if you were one shy of a milestone, we'll send an email to try to encourage them like, hey, you've already gotten 9 referrals, the reward's 10. Like, what are you doing at 9? Let's just get that 10th referral. And so we would also A/B test all of the language, subject lines, call to actions. So the referral program was a big one. But yeah, early days it was nothing but like, we also set up a daily growth email where every night we would see exactly how many subscribers we received that day. And so very unhealthy, but we'd like see like, oh, anything less than like 1,000 or like at scale, like 10,000 was like a failed day. And you're just like kind of always on the clock. Are we building things and are we scaling as quickly as we can be? So that was kind of like a few of the earlier projects we were working on.

Going through that though, you're at Morning Brew, you're growing that newsletter. Obviously it takes off, what you're doing is working. Coming over to Beehive though, starting from scratch, you're starting from zero. You're thinking about this platform though, it's different. It's not like you're just growing a newsletter. It's a different thing, kind of beats completely. Take me through the beginning early days in terms of your co-founders, deciding to work with them on this and what you even like the initial vision was in the beginning. Obviously it's not that old, it's only like a year old now, but I'm just curious on that, even those early days, just thinking about this thing, what was that vision from the start?

Yeah, so not totally different than what it has become, which is great that we've kind of had this initial roadmap and been able to execute fairly close to what the vision was. A lot of it came from the early days of Morning Brew and seeing like what worked and what didn't. And I think from a 10,000-foot view, the, okay, here's a website, here's the newsletter template, you can customize it, you throw a referral program in, that's all pretty straightforward. There are so many nuances and intricacies that are going on behind the scenes, really in the weeds of email, down to the actual email signatures and DMARC, to understanding what data actually matters and collecting how subscribers are engaging with your content to understanding what are vanity metrics versus, or like, what are the things that you should really optimize the platform to be able to decipher and optimize for. And so a lot of it is what worked at Morning Brew deep in the weeds that we can bring to the masses and make it kind of like second nature, like it just comes out of the box with the platform. And that's where we are mostly today. Where we're going, which I've been pretty open about, is like the ad network as well. And I think that there's a huge opportunity to provide monetization opportunities for newsletters and publishers at large. So that's like a really exciting initiative that we kicked off. We have about a dozen ad campaigns live as of November, looking to grow that both in December. And we're also simultaneously building a ton of tech to facilitate and automate like 90% of that process, similar to what we did at Morning Brew as well.

And with that too, so on the monetization side of things, take us through the business model a little bit with— obviously it's a software as a service, a SaaS company as well, but also with what you're doing on that side with the ad network, which is really interesting. I know other newsletters have tried to do something like that more recently, but I think that's a really interesting part of it because of how it grows, even the number of people who would create a newsletter. But tell me the business model, how you're thinking about that and thinking through what that looks like for Beehive.

Yeah, so I mean, just from a company standpoint, the business model is like a pure SaaS play. So we have 3 different tiers. We have a free tier up to 2,500 subscribers. We have a $49 a month tier and then a $99 a month tier. Beyond that, we do have like enterprise for larger senders and we're building a lot more of like an enterprise suite of tools that you would want to tap into if you had multiple newsletters under an umbrella. Or different data API type needs. So that is our model right now. We allow publications to have premium subscriptions similar to a few of our other competitors. Differing from them, we don't take a cut of that subscription revenue. So if you can upsell a free reader to a premium reader and charge $20 a month or whatever you're charging, that is your revenue outside of the Stripe 2.9%, which is kind of like the cost of business of doing business online.

On the internet, yeah.

Outside of that, 100% of your revenue. And then with the ad network, it's definitely a nascent initiative. We don't have like a flat rate fee that we're charging yet. It's a lot of like supply and demand and understanding what that looks like. So right now advertisers come to us, they're interested in tapping into our network of a few thousand active newsletters who are sending through our platform. Again, we have all the first-party data of here's the cadence that they're sending, here's like the actual open rate, click-through rate, who's reading it. We're launching a few other data initiatives to help newsletters understand who their audience is. It also works both ways. It helps us understand who they are as well for better advertising placements. And then over time, we know with different newsletters, like maybe newsletter A has a 1.5% click-through rate on ads in the real estate industry, but like a 3% click-through rate on finance ads. And like, you can do that across all categories and across all different newsletters. And so when a real estate company comes to us to advertise, we know the historical performance of different newsletters and different industries and how they perform. And so being able to optimize that is something we're building as well. But as far as you said, the business model, we do take a cut of that ad revenue, which I believe is warranted. I mean, knowing the process from Morning Brew, if we had 30, 40, 50 people on the sales team doing the outbound sales, there's both selling your audience, there is the copywriting, there's the testing to make sure everything works, there's the actual reporting and exporting of data, cleaning it up, and then invoicing. And if we can remove all 6 of those steps and it's as a newsletter, yes, I like that ad, except And then you're getting paid 2 weeks later. I think we warrant a cut of that revenue. I agree. So that's like the play there.

Yeah, I like it. Why no take rate on the— if they're doing paid subscriptions? Differentiator? Is that strategic? How do you view that?

A little of both, I'd say. Like one, for us, and again, I know some other platforms don't love when ads are being placed in newsletters. Like for me, it's what would benefit the end user the most. And I don't care what they put in their newsletter, how they monetize. Like our interest is in newsletters and publishers finding a way to grow and monetize irregardless. And however we can lean in and build tools to help them is in our best interest. I don't think we need to take a cut of everything that we do to like eat into their margins of what their operations are. So part of it is If you're doing the hard work of creating differentiated content and upselling your readers to be able to pay you, we don't need to— just because we're integrating with Stripe doesn't mean that we should take a 10% cut because we know how to integrate Stripe and maybe you are less technical and you don't feel like going through that. Like, I don't think that warrants a subscription fee. I also think the market opportunity is much less there in general. And then obviously part of it is counterpositioning. If every other competitor in the space is going to take a cut because they know how to integrate Stripe, We are not going to take a cut for doing that. And hopefully, and it's proven to be true, to win over a lot of early users as well. So kind of all of the above.

I feel like that probably definitely, I mean, most likely plays into some of these bigger newsletters as well. When you look at the amount of subscribers they have and for them to, if they're doing paid, like to not have to take that from other platforms where they're getting 20% or whatever they're charging on that, they have paid subscribers to go somewhere else. Obviously that's a huge draw for those bigger News writers who already have an established audience. One thing we have to talk about though, cuz I had to like, stuff I geek out about is like the growth side of it. How did you get your initial users, customers for Beehive? What's that strategy been like? I looked at your blog post on all the different ways you've grown. It was a tweet thread or something. There's a lot of different things you thought about within that. I'm curious on, walk me through how that has gone so far, how you approach the growth for Beehive.

Yeah, I'll definitely acknowledge, like, I'm very fortunate that I lived in New York for 4 years, worked at Morning Brew, built a lot of, like, meaningful relationships with people in the industry, whether it's newsletters, media, tech, content creation. And so that has helped tremendously. When we went and raised money, we raised from about— we had a lead investor in Social Leverage and a few other larger checks from funds. We also had about 30 to 35 strategic angel investors that have a newsletter, podcast, some media play, or previously working at a big media publication. And all of them also had fairly large audiences, whether it's Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. And so by having that initial subset of 35 people who are obviously incentivized for us to help grow, A lot of them were very early beta users and moving over into our platform and experimenting with it and then growing with it. A lot of them made introductions to other newsletter operators and would-be users to recommend them to us. So like that investor base helped a lot in the initial days. Part of it is just being active on social and like really leaning into the Morning Brew story, which I'm definitely not shy about doing. And I think that—

Of course.

There's definitely some legitimacy there to say that I saw Morning Brew from 3 of us in the closet when we had 100,000 subscribers to when I left, I think we were about 40 employees and over 3 million subscribers. And not just being someone who's pushing buttons, but actually building and thinking about a lot of the initiatives and building them out and seeing them into fruition. I think there's a lot of value in that experience. And being able to lean into that and say that same vision and technology that took us 3.5 years at Morning Brew to build, we are doing that so you could be a team of one wherever you are in the world and tap into the same customization, editing tools, growth channels, data analysis, everything I think is like a really powerful narrative. And so leaning into that has helped a lot. And then there's a lot of like the other like growth hacky things that like Both don't scale and do scale. So on the scale front, all of the newsletters have like a publish on Beehive, which most of our competitors have. And it helps that our users have an audience in like what they do, obviously, is being a newsletter that's being sent to thousands of people.

Yeah.

So when we get a new subscriber or a new user who comes over with 50,000 subscribers, when they go and send the next day, that's 50,000 new people that have now seen what Beehive is. I think we've leaned into customization and making the newsletters look really good. And so when X user was sending on whatever platform and it looked okay, and then they move over to our platform, it looks a lot better. They have a referral program, they have audience polls, like it just looks like a refreshed look and there's more functionality built into it. Naturally, some of the readers who are a little bit more in tune with like the space may ask like, how do they do that and where are they sending from now? And so like our users in themselves are also a growth channel. And then like a lot of things that don't scale. So launching things and promoting it endlessly, responding to every DM I get on Twitter and LinkedIn, reaching out to people, getting a notification every time Beehive is tagged in literally anything and reaching out and just building a relationship and offering to help. And then actually following up and helping people onboard, even though it takes a lot of time. I think over time has compounded and built a lot of loyal users who are happy to be with us.

There's so many things to dive into with that and what you mentioned. But one thing is, even on the investor side of it, was it coming from Morning Brew? Obviously, you had that cachet of that, you had built it, the stuff with that, you had done real work on everything Morning Brew from the early days. How was the investing side of it in terms of raising funding for Beehive going through that process? Because it's hard for anyone. I've heard repeat founders who have sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars still have a challenge with raising for their next company, even though they had sold a company previously. Take me through that fundraising side of it for you. How was that process for you?

Yeah, I mean, it was okay. I like, I'm someone who likes to like be heads down and build. And when you are day zero looking at like, here's like the next 16 months of our roadmap, and it's just heads down building, spending countless weeks just having the same conversations over and over again with VCs and angels is like very frustrating because It's not like you're moving forward. It's like a necessary evil. You need the money, but you're not pushing forward on everything that you need to build and accomplish. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a classic that I'm sure you've heard a million times over from fundraising. No one wants to be the first money in and you're like unproven and it's like a risk. When we started raising, it was July of last year, so 2021. And I think Twitter had acquired Revue like maybe 6 to 8 months previously. Facebook just announced Bulletin. So now outside of like the main competitors that everyone's already familiar with in this space, there's like big tech is getting involved in it. And here we are at day zero, no product pre-launch. So the narrative is great. And I think like me and my 2 co-founders, which I haven't hit on, we're both early engineers at Morning Brew as well. So having 3 engineers as like the co-founding team, all from Morning Brew, I think was like a pretty powerful narrative and experience there and great track record. But still like big tech and competitive space. Email in general is just like an incredibly competitive space, massive market, but very competitive. And so a lot of endless conversations. Once we finally got a lead to commit in Social Leverage, it's the classic like once you're— there's less allocation remaining, then everyone wants to jump in. And so I'd say I split up the fundraising experience of pre and post the lead committing. Pre, really annoying. Post, it came together in like 2 weeks and we were turning down people. So I think that's pretty common with most founders.

How long did it take to close Social Leverage?

Funny enough, I was in LA all of July, like in a house with a few friends just for the month. And that was the month that I spent raising money. So it was like, honestly, kind of like timeboxed into one month. I think Social Leverage actually closed end of July. So it was like about a 4-week process, maybe a little bit more.

With the angel side of things, I know you talked about you had like maybe 30, 35 angels that also came in and had big audiences and very strategic on that side, which makes sense. Did you have like, here's my top 100, here's my top 10? Like, did you know you kind of had figured out which ones you wanted, which ones were like, reach or stretch goals, like which ones you're already connected to. Take me through that thinking, cuz I talk to a lot of founders who are considering angel investors. I always kind of bring this up, like if you get some great strategic angels, it can be really helpful for your round. Just take me through your mentality behind that, how you kind of approach the angel side of things for fundraising.

Yeah, I mean, we started building like the prototype the previous November, December, so like of 2020. And so that gave me like, there were 7 months, 8 months where it was a pure side project. And during that time, I was always having conversations with people who were vocal about different platforms that weren't meeting their needs or that I know are really plugged into the newsletter and media ecosystem. And so it wasn't like I'm holding off on all conversations until I'm ready to raise. It was like I was kind of building up during this side project moonlighting stage of these are people that I see as very high value and high leverage. and would love to get them incentivized and involved in some capacity. So you kind of just float those ideas out there as you're building, build those relationships. Usually they're pretty eager of like, hey, like, especially in like 2021, when the market was crazy, and everyone felt like anywhere they could allocate money was a smart thing to do. So a lot of them were pretty proactive and like, let me know when you launch or when you actually raise your round, would love to be a part of it. So did a lot of that. And then the other thing about investing, it's a lot of like social capital. And so by making an introduction to someone who's raising and you're an investing, like you look good. So the amount of like, I maybe had a list of 15 people that I went to initially, and the amount of like, I don't have any money right now, but like, I know 8 people who would love this, and they make 8 introductions, and then some of those people invest, and then they make introductions. So like, it really kind of like balloons outwards, I'd say. But the biggest piece of advice would probably be, before ever raising, just kind of nurture those relationships and conversations and kind of fill people in on what you're doing. I know a lot of founders kind of like to keep it pretty secretive. I was always fairly open with like, this is something we're working on. But yeah.

Tell me about that part too, like building in public. I know you've shared a bunch of stuff online. People have varying opinions on building in public and kind of sharing what you're building and the progress. I'm a fan of it. I see the value of it. Is that always something you thought you were going to do that made sense for Beehive?

I think it depends on like what the product is and who the end user is. For me, like I'd say a most active one Twitter and LinkedIn. And that's where a lot of our users are. A lot of my network or 2 degrees removed would be those people on those platforms. So it helps. Most of our growth comes from, we'll launch a feature, we will create a blog post about it, we'll send it out via email, and then I'll post about it on different channels and people will engage with it. The hope is it's kind of twofold. One, informing current users What is now available that wasn't previously available? And then the other side of that is we have a ton of users who are like, I really want to move to Beehive. You just don't have feature X, feature Y. Once they're live, I'll move over. And so it's kind of like broadcasting like, oh shit, now that's available. Hopefully it's like a growth channel to bring more users in. I definitely feel like, am I kind of annoying constantly posting about things that we're doing or launching or like updated success metrics? Like, for sure.

Yeah.

I think, but I think there's a fine line of like being authentic about it and like trying to change the narrative from like, look at me, look at these growth numbers to here's how we accomplish like this growth. We invested in XYZ channel. This is working well. This isn't working well. And then also being open about like the downsides as well. I think people resonate with like everything isn't like sunshine and butterflies all the time. Like it's very stressful and things we'd make big bets and they don't always work. And so I think if you share the losses as well, people resonate with that. And I'll just, in general, as a person and definitely online, like an open book in terms, in terms of like what we're working on and how I feel about things. And I think with so many people putting on a front for different things, it's like refreshing to have someone build something and tell you exactly how it's going.

Yeah, actually keep it real in terms of the process of everything. And that's what I love sharing about with all these different founders that interview on different podcasts. We have 2 podcasts, the Vitalize Podcast and the Just Go Grind Podcast, is like the behind the scenes on what it actually took to build these things. Because it's so often kind of glossed over in terms of the effort it takes, the strategies they took, why they— how they made decisions, everything behind that. And I know I've heard you on another podcast and read different blog posts of yours and everything, and always trying to get a picture for how you've gone through everything. One thing I'm curious about, was it an easy sell getting, uh, Alex Lieberman, who I believe is an investor, as an investor or advisor, I don't know if he's either one.

Yeah, he invested in our most recent— so we've done 2 rounds. We did our initial like pre-seed and then we kind of did like an extension 6 months ago, right as like the market took a downturn. Um, so he joined that second round. I like easy, I don't know if like that's how I would describe it. Um, I mean, I was obviously like in the trenches with Alex and Austin, the 2 Morning Brew co-founders, from like Way back when. Yeah. There was definitely like a point, like when I left and then I also brought over 2 of my co-founders who were also engineers there, like slight animosity, I guess, initially and like small team. And, you know, that I think that's kind of like the nature of the startup space in general. People always leave and churn and then bring their favorite coworkers to work on like either another company or recruit them for whatever role that they have available.

Yeah.

So I think that's part of like the typical process that you see in startups in general. Still sucks, definitely both ways. But they're both extremely like good friends, supportive, and Austin's an advisor. So we're happy to have both of them on board for sure.

It does feel like though, that's to your point. That's something that I think the founders who are not naive, they understand like the best people on their team will potentially leave them to do other things if they are the A+ players, whatever. Like they're going to do other things eventually. It's like you have them for a certain period of time where you're getting A lot of effort from them, of course. And you stayed there for like 3 and a half years or something. So clearly they got a lot of value from, from you being there, even though it is a little hard to leave at some point, bring people with you. But it's just the reality of the startup game. So it is what it is.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, it sucks.

Expected. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I know you talked about some of the growth things we've gone through, things about the investors and everything. Tell me though, your team being remote, You have like 12 people, I think, in 3 countries from what I've saw more recently. How has that been? I know you said, I think it was on a We Are LA Tech about you didn't initially like the idea of remote work. You have leaned into that and love the pluses of remote work, but how has it been just running your team growing Beehive remotely?

I mean, I'm now the biggest fan of it. I think it's so archaic to imagine a world where you're requiring someone to Commute and like sit in an office or like be in a central location X days a week, even if it's hybrid. That seems like so foreign to me. And the backstory was, I mean, I was in New York in like a tiny apartment when I was like 24, 25. Didn't have a desk, didn't have my own at-home setup. Loved going in the office. Morning Brew had like an amazing team, like a young, fun team. We'd go out, we'd work really hard. There's cold brew on tap, which was amazing. And so like for me to like go into the office and be a part of that environment in New York was amazing. And so when COVID first hit, I was kind of like, so I have to sit on my couch for how long and just like have my laptop on my lap. And like, I just wasn't equipped for at-home work, which was probably like the big thing for me. And then like the social aspect and honestly the cold brew, become a big fan of cold brew. But like once I like adapted, got a bigger apartment, got a desk, got my own cold brew setup. Got everything else.

The essentials.

Yeah. Once I got the essentials, like now it's like, I remember, where was I when I visited New York? I think a few months ago we had like an office through Grand Central Tech, like an incubator program that we got accepted into. And so they gave us the office space. And so meeting with co-founders, like I woke up and I commuted to the office. It was like in the summer, like June, July, and the entire 30 minutes on the subway, I'm just sweating and mad that I'm not at best getting work done. And I was just so pissed off at like the whole commuting environment. So yes, to answer your question, I've done a full 180. I am so pro remote work. And then as far as like scaling the team remotely, just like one, the obvious is having access to a global talent pool that it doesn't matter what time zone they're in or where they live or work, that they can contribute to your team. I think unlocks a ton of potential. Most of our team, I think, is primarily on the East Coast. I'm on the West Coast. So finding just like an overlapping of time to do meetings, but we're also like very meeting light. Our team skews very engineering heavy, very like independent contributor of just getting shit done.

Yeah.

And so the less meetings, the more focus time, the better. And as long as we can touch base for like a daily standup, align on things and like make things, make sure things are unblocked and moving forward. That's really the only requirement we have. Yeah. So, I mean, no concerns. I'd say the biggest thing is like we've done one team retreat in Austin last year, which was great. Yeah, I saw that. We'll probably do another one sometime in like the first half of 2023. Coordinating those are always fun and like, it's awesome to like build up the camaraderie remotely and then see each other in person for like a long weekend and both do some work and fun. But yeah, I mean, everything, I have no complaints.

It's, it is interesting to see. I mean, we are focused on the future of work at Vitalize in terms of investing. So we always, anything work-related, we invested in a company that has like another workspace type of company, but it's a community-based. I mean, it sounds like we work, but it's obviously not. Um, but that type of thing, as we're thinking about where people are going in and they want some space at some point, they want it like part of the time, like so many things that you think about. And we've interviewed a number of people who have run either, you know, either like The kind of HR global payments type of stuff all across the world. So you'd think about hiring and cross-border, all of that. There's so many different aspects of remote work now to think about, but it's possible. It's pretty easy to implement when you notice all the tools that are available, which is good. And I think one thing I'm curious about with everything you're doing and with Beehive, like what's next? Because you've, I think you said in a blog post recently, you're approaching a million ARR. You see an average of 55% month-over-month growth since launch. What's next? You guys have been moving very fast on building features. I see them launch all the time on Twitter and everything. Like, what's next for Beehive?

Yeah, I keep saying the words feature parity, but we're also trying to compete across the spectrum of so many different players. So smaller, like starter email platforms to blogging platforms to like Web3 platforms, like enterprise email platforms. And all of them kind of specialize in something slightly different. And so I've been floating out feature parity, but that really means like, can we match the best of this platform and the best of this platform kind of across the spectrum? So it's kind of like a— and they're obviously all building and innovating at some pace as well. So like, it's hard enough to catch up to one competitor, but when I'm trying to match the functionality and the best of like 7 to 8 different players in the space that I think do really well, it's like very ambitious. And I think what drives a lot of the team to keep executing at a really high level. For us, I'd say I still see a good 6 months of our initial roadmap that we created even a year ago of like, here's where we want to be. This is the core functionality. This should be incredibly easy. We should be able to match the best of XYZ of these different companies. And I still think we have a ways to go there. The ad network's a massive build and something that we already have under development. But can get infinitely complex if we want to actually— like, the bold mission I have there is, can we compete with— for ad dollars from Facebook and Google? And like, if you're an advertiser who wants to hit an audience that's really engaged, like, you know what you're gonna get from Google Search and Display, you know what you're gonna get from Facebook and Instagram. It's also getting very competitive and expensive. Can you get in front of a very niche audience via email? And can we do that better than anyone else in the industry? Is like a very ambitious project and that's like an evergreen project that we'll continuously build out over time. And then beyond that, like newsletters is our first lane for sure, but like where's the natural extension into audio, video, community, other types of content that we can really own? So needless to say, there's like plenty to do. The thing that I don't have any issues with is like coming up with like more things to add to the roadmap and get really good at. We could also pause everything and look at what we have and probably make everything that we have twice as good as it is now by adding a little bit more customization, making the UI and UX a little bit better. So there's no shortage of things for us to build. It's really just blocking and tackling and prioritizing the right things.

What is your thought on that then in terms of optimizing what you have versus going after these different features that have the feature parity as you mentioned? Because you have 1,000 different ways you could go as you mentioned. What even helps you along the way with deciding that and deciding what you need to do?

From like day one, it's been kind of like approaching our would-be ideal users to come over and sell them on what we offer. And usually they're pretty straightforward with, I like these 5 things, but you don't have these 2. And like, I can't move over until you launch these 2 features. And then when you have that same conversation with 20 different users and the same 2 things keep coming up, Like that's a dead giveaway of like, we need to build these 2 things and yesterday. And so that's like a way of prioritizing things. So that's like what I'd consider the blocking and tackling of moving people over based on like things that you don't currently offer that their current solution does and building those first. There's also like the big bets that we're taking that aren't being done by other competitors and that we are gonna make an assumption that people will find a lot of value in that and like kind of Prioritizing that accordingly with all of the other initiatives. And then again, like making things better. We are very— we lean into user feedback and support a ton. And when people constantly complain about one feature or something that they can't currently do in our platform, pretty big giveaway that we need to allocate more resources to making that better. So I think it's some combination of those 3, like our overarching roadmap, what's blocking people from moving over, what are current users complaining about? So it's enough to keep us up.

Yeah, there's plenty to go through with that. One of the last things I'm curious about, kind of switching gears a little bit to the newsletter, the writers, the creators themselves. First off, I wanna just ask like, why use Beehive? Like what's the pitch for someone using Beehive versus other platforms we will not name? Why Beehive?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's to avoid repeating a lot of what I've already said. I think it's leaning into what we do really well. Rather than being forced into a closed sandbox, we have one, we are open APIs that we have that you can integrate with a bunch of other different platforms. We're really good with customization. We're really easy to use. We lean into growth and data. So we have growth tools like a recommendation engine. We have a referral program and we have great data capabilities of understanding where your audience is coming from. How they're engaging differently, different cohort type analysis, and making it like dead simple where you don't need to have an understanding of data science or analytics to understand what readers are performing better and where you should double down your efforts to acquire new readers. So those are like on the growth and data side of things. Customization is great, the open API and everything else that we play well with. Monetization again. So we've kind of already hit on the premium subscriptions and how we're kind of counterpositioned against a bunch of others. And then the ad network, if that's something you're interested in, being able to monetize via ads. I also think where we are very competitive is everything that I've said about leaning into user feedback. We are overly obsessive with making our product better, and we're a team of engineers who work really quickly to get things out the door. And so when we hear feedback and we can internalize and say, that's actually a tremendous idea, we could do that a lot better. Like, we're pretty quick to get that out the door. And I think with that mentality, as we continue to scale it, we can continue to adapt quicker than most of our other competitors to really just do whatever moves the needle forward for our users. Like, their needs come way before ours. And if we can just deliver on that, I think we'll find success inherently as well.

You have a lot of experience obviously with Morning Brew growing that newsletter in a very specific format for how that newsletter was run. And now they've branched out in different kind of verticals as well with theirs. I'm curious from your perspective, having that experience growing everything in terms of newsletters for someone starting out today, this is a super selfish question for myself. What would you tell them about starting a newsletter, growing a newsletter, having success with a newsletter? Anything from your experience that you think might be helpful for others starting a newsletter today or considering starting a newsletter soon?

Yeah, I think a lot of it starts with like not being afraid to ask for feedback. I think one thing that we are trying to build more tools around is making more of a two-way street, not just like one person broadcasting their thoughts and news to their audience.

Yeah.

And so typically where it does feel like you're spending hours writing the newsletter, you send it and that's it. Like building something like audience polls, which we built a few months ago, And the different data collection tactics that we're working on to understand what are readers actually engaging with? What do they like about the newsletter? What don't they like about the newsletter? At the end of the day, it's like the most classic startup of like, you need to understand your 1,000 true fans, but really understanding why people are subscribing to your newsletter in the first place. Are you meeting their expectations once they do subscribe that whatever they were expecting out of it and the things that you do well and people agree that you do well, can you double down on that? Because that is what's most important beyond the referral program or the recommendations or any of these other growth hacks and acquisition channels. If you have a leaky bucket of people are coming in and you're not delivering value and you don't understand what value they're trying to obtain from you, you're not gonna be able to grow and scale that. So that's always first and foremost is nailing the content. And something I always gave a disclaimer with when talking about Morning Brew, I worked on the referral program and a bunch of this data acquisition tools and cohort analysis, but if the content sucked and the writers weren't as talented as they were, that would've all been for nothing. And so it really does start with the content first. Once you nail down the content, then you can get sexy with all the different growth acquisition and data and experimenting with different acquisition channels. But yeah. Content first, for sure.

Do you think Morning Brew also, in terms of the— obviously you weren't on the content side, but you saw it all the time because you're obviously promoting it. Like, because it was a daily thing, was it this habit of having it daily? Was that any factor in the growth in how it caught on? I'm curious on how your thoughts on that are.

Yeah, it's a great question because it's kind of like a double-edged sword of like, yes, building a habit out of daily, it's much more in your face and much more habitual than if you were to send 3 times a week or once a week or sporadically. So building a habit in someone's life definitely helps a ton. And I think we nailed that into people's heads with the marketing and how we would go about talking about Morning Brew is like, start your day with Morning Brew, go into the office informed. That was all very intentional. I came up with the idea to add the coffee mug as well in the subject line. Which was like, just like, read a book, like one of the Ryan Holiday books about like building habits and like associations with things. And he was talking about like the whole KitKat campaign of like the whole like give me a break thing and how like going on a break would make you think of KitKats. And so I tried to like instill that into like, oh, if you forgot to read Morning Brew but you grabbed a coffee, like hopefully the coffee would like bring up the association with I should go to my email and read Morning Brew. But yeah, that's all to say, like, habitualness of it and the cadence I think definitely plays a part.

Yeah.

Even if you're not gonna go daily, 'cause it's hard, especially when you're just starting off and you don't have like the bandwidth or team to do it, just being very consistent. Like for example, like I love James Clear's Thursday newsletter. Like I know when it's coming in my inbox and that it's every Thursday. So as long as there's like some sort of regular cadence to it, I think you're gonna set yourself up for success, sporadically sending is not gonna help you out.

Yeah, I, I've seen like even like the growth of the Milk Road, for instance, which is a very frequent, obviously newsletter, um, seeing how they've succeeded. And again, it's like a very, it's like a daily, 5 days a week, uh, newsletter. And then you have like, like published press. I think it's a couple days a week, I wanna say, uh, from that. But I'm just kind of paying attention to all different newsletters and how they're going about it. There's no one strategy for sure, but some type of cadence seems to be helpful. I do think the daily thing is interesting. I at one, one point did this podcast daily. like 100-some days in a row or something, and did just see that habit. And the growth from that was like, damn, if I could pull it off in terms of being able to execute on it, I see why daily is just amazing. It's killer.

I mean, I just got anxiety from thinking about you doing this.

Yeah, it was a lot, especially interviews, because then you're like always booking guests. But newsletter seems way more manageable, especially if it's quicker. If you look at something like Someone like Fred Wilson and how he's grown years ago as a VC, but like his kind of almost daily cadence of that. Seth Godin from a marketing perspective daily, obviously it's a shorter type of thing, but you kind of choose, you know, pick your poison in some regards with that. You have that versus someone like Mario Gabriel, The Generalist, which is like these deep dives, obviously is a little bit different. Not boring, much different thing as well, deep dives. And then he also introduced another format as well. So I've been looking at News Edge a lot recently, so I'm very interested in all these things. But Tyler, as we're wrapping things up here, where's the best place for people to learn more about Beehive and connect with you if they would like to as well?

Yeah, definitely Twitter. So I'm fairly active on Twitter. It's @denk_tweets, D-E-N-K on Twitter. And then from there, @bee hive on Twitter as well. Beehive spelled incorrectly, B-E-E-H-I-I-V. But yeah, if you were to follow either of us on Twitter, you'd get a pretty regular dose of what we're working on, what people are— we were also pretty good at promoting other content creators on our platform. So when people launch newsletters, when they experiment with different formats or content types, like they tweet at us and we promote it. So you'll get a good sense of what other people are doing on the platform as well.

Awesome. Tyler, thanks so much for time today. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.