Can Beehiiv Become A Billion Dollar Newsletter Startup?

Hey everybody, welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host KP, and on this show I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible Guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildinpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Tyler Denk. Tyler, welcome to the show, man.

Excited to have you.

How are we? Thanks for having me.

So I have to kick it off by tossing the question that came from Austin, Austin Rief from Morning Brew, putting audience first, right? Putting— doing this sort of questions from building in public point of view. I just tweeted maybe 10 minutes ago before you're joining the show, and I asked the audience to chime in with questions and he chimed in saying, Tyler, you left Morning Brew and joined Google and spent almost 10 months there. What did you learn from that experience? I thought that was a great sort of segue for us to get going. So what do you think?

Yeah, way to build in public for the Build in Public podcast by asking for audience questions. But yeah, it's actually a great question and I have I think a good answer to it. Austin knows me from the 22-year-old who joined Morning Brew and built the referral program, the ad platform, the CMS, and more or less like the Wild West. Like I had no process or reason for building things. Right. Austin said, our goal is to grow Morning Brew to be as large as we possibly can. And any ideas you have to help us grow, present it. And if I'm on board, let's build it. And so that led me, a perfect example was we were copying and pasting content into an HTML template. the writers were every single night and sending through Mailchimp. Right. And I saw that as a process deficiency and said, let's build a CMS where our content team and writers can build the newsletter in our own platform. There's tons of CMSs available. Me being young and naive and 22, 23 years old and a self-taught developer, I said, let me just build our own. I have no idea how long it'll take. I have no idea the requirements, what the end state is, what the user flow is, what the workflow, what the KPIs are. But I, I see a problem that our writers shouldn't be copying and pasting into an HTML template. So let me build something. And Austin had enough trust in me to say, okay, go ahead and build it. And so I spent about 3 months building a CMS for Morning Brew. Yeah. Thankfully it worked and we used it for the duration of the 3 and a half years that I was there. But I'd say that's actually like a perfect example of I didn't create a document of how was I going to build it? What are the constituent parts? What does the wireframe, how does it work? And like, what are the potential roadblocks? So I'd say the 3 months I was building that, I woke up every morning with a ton of anxiety because again, this is my first job out of college and there are no rules. I don't really have a manager. I just said, I'm going to spend 3 months of time building or an undefined amount of time to build it. And I never knew it was going too well. I never knew when I was going to hit a point or a roadblock where I was like, wait, I can't do this. So there's a reason why people don't build their own CMS because of X. Right. And I didn't map out what X could have been. 'Cause I didn't think about it. I didn't plan. I had no idea. I just built. So that is, I think, an example of like the Wild West of me having no process and just building things because we needed to build things in a startup. Fast forward to answering Austin's question about what did I learn at Google?

Yeah.

Google is like the holy grail of product management in terms of process and how you're supposed to go about doing things. And so while only being there for 10 months, I learned like a product requirement document is like a piece that I was missing, which is—

PRD, right? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Like I learned that like day one at Google. It's like anytime you're going to build a feature or like a new system, there's like a pretty defined document and there's like different nuances to it, but more or less, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the P0 features, the P1, the P2 features? What are the wireframes that like, how should it look? When you click on button X, what does it do? When you click on button Y, what does it do? What are the KPIs that measure success? And then like, what's a rough roadmap of how you're going to get from point A to point B? And then how are you going to launch it? So those are like some of the constituent parts of just having like a coherent plan is like a very simple term of like, there's a rhyme and a reason for why we are building something. And here's a 10-page document explaining it, why we're building it and how it's going to work. Then once you're done with the PRD, being able to pass that over to an engineer to create a technical scoping doc, that's like, as the engineer who's going to inherit and own the building of this feature or platform, here's like the tech— I'm taking the product, which is a little bit more like layman's terms of how it should work and actually explaining the underlying Here's the database, here's the tables, the rows, the new models we're going to create. Here's like the state machine or whatever it is to actually build what the product manager outlined in the PRD. So there's a very refined process. It's the PRD, you give that to an engineer, the engineer builds a technical scoping doc that is the underlying tech of how to build it. You get sign-off on the PRD, you get sign-off on the technical scoping doc from the engineering team, and then there's like alignment and a plan and a rough timeline to build that. So that's like a very defined process of how they build everything at Google, which I built, I think, in my 10 months, like 3 or 4 PRDs there. And so— You

know what it reminds me though? It reminds me of like almost a, you know, the scene that I got in my mind was like this sort of very defined, clear, like, you know, automobile companies have this floor where like, you know, there are different parts that are being assembled onto the car, the chassis, and then it moves through like a conveyor belt of sorts, right? It's very, very clear, defined, and it's like In a way, regimented, but for the good reasons, because systems of scale have to come in play, right? Let me ask you a fun question. Did you have more fun while you were at startups like Morning Brew before or at Google?

I feel like I know the answer. Fairly obvious, right?

Because I— But so what were you looking for then at Google? I'm curious, what made you think, all right, I'm going to go from a startup like Morning Brew to one of the titans in the industry, Google, or take any, like Facebook, Meta, whatever. What made you make that jump?

Yeah, so the backstory is I joined Morning Brew kind of right out of college. So 22, 23, went up to New York, joined Morning Brew. I was the second employee, so it was the 2 founders, a writer, and me. And I saw the growth from us making, you know, $50,000 a month to like $25 million a year, from us 3, us 4 people to 35, 40 employees. Wow. And so I had like that startup, like was not a co-founder, but very, very early employee, took like a senior leadership role. I saw the growth of the company in stages from 6 of us in a tiny office to us building out teams, to building management teams, to building like a legitimate company with revenue optimizations and everything else going on there. Incredible experience. I've always loved startups my entire life. I've read TechCrunch all of college. I've read every book on like these like big tech companies in Silicon Valley. So like startups are my bread and butter and like entrepreneurship is what I'm interested in. That being said, as you try to advance your career, you just need to collect different experiences and skill sets from different places. And so at 26, 27, right before Morning Brew got acquired and I kind of knew that like my time there was coming to an end, I was like, okay, I've done the 3 to 35 employee thing. I've seen startups, but I had the realization of how we started the podcast of I don't know what product— I didn't know what product was before joining Morning Brew. I kind of fell into it by understanding it's the grouping of marketing and engineering and growth all under one. And I was like, I kind of made that role myself and carved it out in Morning Brew, but I don't actually know what product is. Right. And I was always intrigued by like the big tech companies. I wanted to learn what product management was at scale. And so what better place to do it than a place like Google that has very defined scale and processes around product management? So the reason was, let's go see and learn from other people. At Morning Brew, I was kind of— Austin was my manager, but he was busy doing his other things and responsibilities. So I was kind of running the show in terms of like product and engineering. Let me actually learn from people in the industry at a big tech company printing billions of dollars. And so full circle.

Trillions, right?

Yeah, to answer your question, like, that is what I learned. I got what I came for. I went to Google and I did learn that process, which I still apply today at Beehive. But more fun is definitely startups for me.

I couldn't agree more. I had a few stints at big corporates, Fortune 500 companies, and they kind of— it's a different ballgame completely, right? It's very, very different. And I'm grateful for my time there. I was at Turner Studios, massive company, Delta Airlines, again, massive. And you learn to respect sort of the power of routines and processes and all these things because they have that kind of scale, right? But also what blew my mind was nobody on a daily basis had to worry about where the revenue is coming from, where the customers are, what's the acquisition, right? Because it's like so crazy. They're not Series B, Series C, Series D. They're like past IPO. Like Delta has been around for 100 years maybe. Like it's like so crazy far into the future from their inception that you don't have to worry about some of the shit that we worry about on startups, right? We're like, where's the next wave of customers coming from? They don't have to worry about that. So it was very interesting to observe. So I have a question before we move to the origin story of Beehive. I have a sort of question that just came to me when you mentioned Austin. By the way, this podcast, as I said earlier, there's a connection between this and Morning Brew founders. Alex Lieberman was the OG first guest ever on my show. So shout out to Alex if you're listening. Thank you for that. You've worked so closely with both of them, Alex and Austin. So my question to you is, what is one characteristic or trait that you would like to steal from each of them?

It's a great question.

Thank you.

Alex is one of the most articulate, well-spoken, can motivate a group of people to say, here's a vision I have, here's how I think we're going to execute it, and getting everyone on the same page and was relentless in terms— so I guess 2. One is like just how articulate and great of a communicator Alex is, which anyone who has listened to Alex speak on his podcast or anywhere knows that. The other was like his relentless drive. He has no shame when it comes to sales or honestly anything. And so like early days—

He's a superstar, right?

Yeah. the sales team and the amount of times that he would turn around in the office and be like, this person's ignored me 11 straight emails. I'm about to email him a 12th time and then show up to his office later today. And like, he just did not give a shit at all. Like, that relentlessness was incredible to watch, and that's why he was the best seller and a big reason why Morning Brew was able to get off the ground. So that's like Alex, I guess, like a twofer there. For Austin, Austin's just like an unbelievable operator. He just sees things from a 10,000-foot view, but can go down into the weeds and say, this is what we need to optimize, this is what we need to change. We need to hire someone to fill this bandwidth gap over here. He just operates on a different level and is relentless in optimizing from top to bottom. And so being in—

It's kind of like the backbone almost, right? The operational backbone. Yeah.

I mean, it shows why they were such great co-founders. One was super articulate and vision-driven and creative. The other is like, That's the vision. This is how we're going to get there and this is how we're going to operate, who we're going to hire, what we need to do better. So like an amazing one-two punch. And I mean, obviously no surprise why Morning Brew is so successful.

Dream team, right? Yeah. So let's fast forward a couple months into your Google journey. And I think towards the end of like 10 months, you said 11 months roughly, you made the switch to going full time into Beehive. Was it full time or were you doing part time, kind of like moonlighting for a while until you saw some traction? Kind of walk us through that Beehive origin story in a nutshell.

Yeah, so I left Morning Brew around October of 2020, like right before they got acquired by Business Insider. And in my week between Morning Brew and starting at Google, I just had no work. It was the first time in 3 and a half years. I just came from the startup grind and was sitting around. I actually had COVID that week, and so I was like actually stuck in my room, just bored and didn't have responsibilities for the first time. And I was like, okay, most people view that as an opportunity to watch movies and Netflix and relax in between jobs. I'm kind of like, this is a really unique opportunity where I have no responsibilities, and I can just build or tinker wherever I want. I've always kind of had the idea for what Beehive was back from the Morning Brew days. A lot of the impetus came from, we built a totally bespoke ecosystem within Morning Brew from website, email, CMS, ad management platform, referral program, growth tools. And a lot of times we had the feedback by dozens of replies per day being like, hey, what referral program do you use? What CMS do you use? So there was an appetite from our readers. to build the newsletter templates and the growth engines and the data points that we were looking at to replicate the success of Morning Brew. And so I saw those touchpoints routinely coming in from the inbox. Me and my, who would go on to be my 2 co-founders at Beehive, Ben, and then later Jake, would always kind of talk about, they're both engineers as well. And I think most engineers always just want to build things that are touched by millions of people is kind of the goal. And so we would always be like, this is really cool. We're building for like our internal employees of like 25, 30, but wouldn't it be really cool if whatever newsletter publication or whoever could come in and send newsletters through our infrastructure. So the impetus was kind of built at Morning Brew of like what we built from the tech perspective is really cool. Looking at the landscape of what other people were doing to send emails was very kind of abstract in the sense that you use like WordPress to host content, you use an API to send it with like one of like 20 different types of ESPs. If you want data and audience development, you have to set up like a BI tool. If you want a referral program, it's a separate tool. So there's a lot of desperate tools that you were using to kind of build what we had built innate at Morning Brew.

Morning Brew.

So that was kind of the impetus. When I left Morning Brew, I had that week off and I called Ben and I was like, hey, like we've always talked about this idea of maybe like building a platform that would kind of replicate a lot of what we built at Morning Brew, but open to anyone that could send emails and scale their audience. And the first reaction is like, that's a lot of work. Like that took 3 and a half years and it was very difficult to do. And there's so many intricacies with email from like deliverability and IPs and it was hard enough for us to manage our list of 5 or 6 at Morning Brew, thinking that it could be a self-serve platform for millions of people to come on and grow their own list. Tough challenge. And I said, think about it, let's see what we can do here. But like, I'm really passionate about it and I kind of already know the playbook of what we can do to make it better from what we've already learned. And then eventually he goes, well, if I'm going to build this, I think we should bring on Jake. He's like the smartest person that I know. Right. I go, well, you're the smartest person that I know, so this seems like a great little trio. And I met Jake. We hired Jake on my way out. So Jake came in as a software engineer. So fast forward, It's me, Ben, and Jake. We moonlight. They're at Morning Brew. I'm at Google. We're spending nights and weekends building this. Extremely stressful. The benefit is—

How long did it take to get the MVP out or some version of that?

It was about a year. So we started around November, December is when we started meeting weekly and setting goals. We had a whole notion of like, here's the key P0 features that we need. This is how we can get to market. These are nice to haves, but don't need them. And kind of backed into building a roadmap. I don't think it would've been possible if it wasn't for COVID. During COVID I was spending— there's no distractions, right? There was nothing to really do. So it was easier to—

No social life, like we said earlier.

Yeah. That mean actually not joking about not having a social life, but actually not having a social life. And it was definitely very stressful, right? I was getting ramped up at Google. I had a corporate job. They were still in the startup hustle post-acquisition. They had a lot of responsibilities. So there was a lot of really late nights and weekends. We did some hackathons where we'd spend Friday, Saturday, Sunday together in person in New York building, but very stressful. Finally got it to an MVP point in the summer of 2021. I posted a tweet about what we were working on to get a waitlist of interest. We had 450 people submit a form being like, I'm interested in this. Nice. We took that. I spent all of July raising money. We raised a seed round. We all put in our 2-ish weeks to quit and went full-time August, September of 2021. And then launched publicly November of 2021. So it really was like from deciding we were going to do it to launching publicly was almost a full calendar year, but a lot of late nights in between those.

Are you super proud of that chapter? Are you super proud of that chapter? Like the one year it took?

I mean, amazing experience because one, like when you have nothing to show for it because it's all in like a beta MVP and there's no traction, there's no revenue, there's like And you're balancing like one, giving up all of your free time, social life, family, hobbies, and making your life a lot more stressful with nothing to show. It's difficult and it's very easy to quit at any point.

Yeah.

I had to do my best like sales job of like convincing even Ben and Jake like, hey, I think there's like a real opportunity here. 'Cause I mean, they're burnt out beyond belief as we all were. So one, like very proud, but I also think it's a great case study of a lot of people glorify like the entrepreneurial journey of like ramen diet, no money, not paying yourself for months. until you get your first few customers. We actually de-risked the process as much as possible. Yeah. We didn't quit our jobs until we had funding basically secured in the bank. We had a salary to go to. We had a huge proof of concept. We had early interest from a waitlist. So we went into it, granted, a very competitive space, but we knew that we had a foundational product that worked. We had an MVP, we had interest from users, and we had investment money and a salary to pay ourselves. So it was, The opposite of what a lot of times is portrayed as like the journey.

I was going to say that, right? Because you could have— all 3 of you could have just simply on a whim quit whatever you were doing and then just kind of went all in. Because typically that's the story we hear about, right? Oh, I had this insight that week. You talked about the COVID week that, you know, and you're like, oh, I had this insight. The 3 of us met and then you were like, okay, we just quit and spent 3 months banging out the MVP. Because I feel like if you were full-time, it wouldn't have taken a year, right? Like it would have taken earlier, much, much more. But you kind of took the more pragmatic scenic route, you know, which is, by the way, my story is like that too. I took 11 years, which is probably even longer, but part of it was the visa challenges, Tyler. It took me 11 years, 6 months to be full-time founder CEO. But I knew when I came to America on the first day that I was going to be a founder CEO, but it took me a long-ass time. But I had to de-risk at every stage something or the other. There was one visa risk, then there was the can I afford to pay myself risk, then I have a, you know, family risk. So I had to de-risk and de-risk and de-risk. The weird thing though is I feel— I wonder how you felt. I feel like the flame hasn't like died, you know, from the day I had the idea to the day it happened. Like it's the same thing. In fact, if anything, I was even more appreciative of the opportunity now. Right. Did you feel that when you were finally like full-time in your own startup paycheck in your own company? Did you feel like a sense of like, all right, now let's amp it up a little bit more?

Yeah. And almost in a sense of Not that it's become easier because we work a shit ton, but we were, prior to going all in, basically had 2 full-time jobs of complete— Yes. Cost switching, right? So it actually, even though we were working 60, 70, 80-hour weeks when we went full-time on it and still do it to this day, it was at least I'm not sitting at my day job thinking about what I want to build later, and I'm not staying up till midnight, 1 AM to build something just because that's what it takes to move this forward. It was, wait, we wake up every day and the only thing we have to think about is what do we need to build, who do we need to hire, how do we scale this platform versus 2 completely different jobs. Different things. Yeah. So extremely stressful. How do I handle it? Period. And even at the end, before we did go all in on it, there was still like the jumping off point of should we still do this for another 2 to 3 months to de-risk it, see if we have any more traction? But it kind of got to the point of like, I see the opportunity in the market. It's a very competitive space. We've kind of showed our hand a bit of what we're building and other competitors are going to pick up and start launching things quicker, which they did. We can't afford to be doing this 20 hours a week part-time if we actually want this to So it's kind of a now or never type thing. And obviously we made the leap.

Nice. So tell me about this one. I believe every MVP has one killer feature that kind of, you know, steals the show and there's everything else kind of addressing. What was that for you if you reflect on it? Like, I'm sure there was 4 or 5 features when you launched that were like promising, but like there had to have been a killer feature that people loved. What was that for you?

I think there were maybe 2 that we kind of went to market with. One was, I think the easy comparison for us when we launched was Substack in the sense of like an all-in-one can send to both blog and email. And Substack historically had been very style light in like every website and newsletter looked identical. Right. And I think that was intentional on their end. We went the complete opposite direction of every newsletter looks very different on our platform. And so if you were working within the constraints of their style guidelines, you could come to us and build your own brand identity. And we leaned on that pretty heavily at the beginning, both from like a web and email perspective. So some source of brand and identity was like one of the go-to-market And then the other, which was just the referral program, which is kind of like what Morning Brew became known for in terms of like the growth world of how we scaled our audience from 50K to 3.5 million, was this referral program that drove millions of subscribers to Morning Brew. And being able to go to market was saying, you don't need to use an API, you don't need to sync up 4 different tools, you don't need to build it yourself. That comes with the product. Was a very compelling value proposition Hey, I was using Mailchimp to send my email, but if I use Beehive, I get a newsletter referral program built in. Those 2 were kind of like our go-to-market strategy, one of them being flashy enough to attract people to move over.

Right. Do you— I mean, I feel like, as I recall back in the day, there was another referral tool, which I don't know if they're still around, but they were— this is a while ago that I ever used any of these tools, but like, I forgot the name. There was another independent referral tool.

Yeah, there's like 3 or 4.

Yeah. So I feel like, are you saying that you kind of like made that tool a feature almost, which is crazy?

So almost, well, yes, that's how I feel about a lot of the competitors is that we have made their entire product a feature that's included into our product. But yeah, I would say when Morning Brew's referral program was working very well, there were 3 to 4 competitors that launched referral program tools for newsletters where they actually screenshot of the Morning Brew referral program that we built and just put it on their landing page. Like, you can do that. Like, their marketing was the same referral program as Morning Brew, which competitively made me feel great because I built that program and functionality. And so to think that they can do it better than us and like we kind of had all the insights of what was working and how it worked and how to optimize it. But yeah, that became a part of our platform when we launched.

Yeah. So in that storyline, right, like if you look back, there must have been some really difficult moments in the first, let's say, November, If you launch to the next 6, 7 months, what were some of the really difficult barriers or obstacles for you at the time that now you're looking back, you overcame them? Obviously

a lot. I'd say the biggest one is we weren't first movers in this space. In fact, I think the email space is one of the more competitive industries.

So I had a question about that, actually. You know, if you can answer that, maybe, which is you entered arguably one of the most saturated categories. Email marketing. There's ConvertKit, there's Mailchimp, there's Substack, there's Ghost. What were you thinking, number one? And number two is what mindsets and like what, I guess, unique insights that you had at the time that led you to say, you know, we can outpace all this?

Yeah. So the initial pitch was a lot of these email platforms existed, but they were one part of our tech stack at Morning Brew. But our tech stack was actually a CMS. It was growth tools like the referral program. There were data and audience development dashboards and tools that we to understand our audience. There was like a customization suite, which was like either myself or an email developer building better templates that could do more and look better in the inbox. There were monetization tools like ads and subscriptions. And so when you actually look at what made Morning Brew successful, the email service provider was one of like 8 tools in our tech stack that we were using. Everything else was either a combination of tying them together via API and building integrations or building our own tools like the CMS. And the ad management platform. So the insight that I saw was most people are viewing their email service provider as an expense and one part of the tech stack. I think we can bring the entire portfolio of the tech stack into one single platform, which comes with a ton of optimizations, and then also make it a revenue driver, not an expense. So our goal right now with Beehive is you'd pay us $99 a month for all of our features, ideally from premium subscriptions, boosts, host and the ad network, you're making 10, 20x the revenue through our platform that we're paying you than you're paying us. Wow. And so ideally you're extracting significantly more value than we're extracting from you. And that's like the real value proposition and kind of the insight of what I saw from day one and what we're still building towards. To answer your question more directly of like the obstacles, we entered one of the more competitive industries. And when you launch, I mean, there's like a few different ways to launch. There's like, wait, build in stealth until you have everything and it's a very compelling product. And then there's the complete opposite, Which is like what a lot of people think. Public.

Yeah.

It was like building public, but also if you built it perfectly, you launched too late. And so we built, we launched with like literally an MVP in a very competitive space. And so I'd say still to this day, but I think we're finally getting to the other side of it. There was always the insecurity of most of our support tickets were, hey, can you build in automation? Hey, how come I can't send to this segment of my list? Hey, how come I can't see this type of data? And it wasn't because we were too dumb to know that we, that people wanted It was like an order of operations of like, we knew we were going to build that. We just haven't got there yet. And so I'd say a lot of my insecurity and stress for the first 18 months up until very, very recently has been, yes, you can do a few things on our platform and it's all in one and it's nice and it's like a good UI, but there's probably like a handful of core functionality that most email platforms provide that we just don't offer. And so we actually can't tap into certain potential users because they need certain things that they're expecting from other platforms. And so that was always like, and that actually derives like what our strategy has been about building in public and our tenacity to launch things so quickly all stemmed from the insecurity of launching an MVP in a very competitive space where I knew day one, this is the least compelling product and feature-wise out of all of the competitors. Right. But what I want to show you is where we're missing. We will build it and we will build it quickly because I know what to build better than the competitors from my experience previously. And anything that you think would be additive to build as a functionality or feature, it's likely on our roadmap and we're getting there soon. And that is the whole building in public strategy for us.

Yeah, man, that takes guts to both, you know, be aware and self-aware as a team and as you yourself to say like, okay, we are only going to do 6% of our roadmap as the priority right now. And we're going to still launch in public, not make it stealth and not make it beta, alpha, whatever, and still take the hits from the, the You know, average person, because average person looks at the fully furnished roadmap of a competitor and they're like, oh, why is this missing? And you're like, you're not telling me anything that I don't know, man. I know that's missing. Like, we know.

Once we started to get larger and more well-known, like, people will write like product comparisons of like, hey, let's look at Beehive versus Mailchimp versus whatever. And it'll be like, oh, Beehive's good here. It's like a little bit cheaper, does this, but it's missing this feature, which all the other ones have. And so then, I mean, I don't know how often these blogs like update that, but like the goal was like, I'm aware that we're missing that. We're going to launch it next quarter. That is the risky run. But I think—

So look, I mean, I think my fundamental belief with a lot of these saturated spaces, Tyler, is that given enough time in the market, almost all products have— will reach what they call feature parity, right? Which means you are going to go through the rest of the missing parts in the roadmap in the next 18 months and you're going to reach a point where the top 4 choices in this niche are going to have very similar feature sets almost. So I think you were right to not worry and panic about it, but I'm sure like the inbound DMs and customer support tickets are like probably, you know, like The first few would've been like, ah, we know. But if you had to zoom out, I wonder how you would describe philosophically how and why Beehive is different compared to the other 4 or 5 players, right? Because at some point, imagine all the 4 have the same features, right? Then it cannot be about features.

Yeah. And I'd say while that's an oversimplification that eventually you will reach feature parity, I think a lot of these different companies fundamentally have different end goals or objectives, and they actually won't have feature parity. Some of them are just better at marketing automation, and their target Target customer are people who are selling courses or e-commerce, and they want to go down marketing automation. We have picked out a niche of content creation like the Morning Brew Milk Road. If the newsletter is the product, like that is where we have decided to start and just own that space. And so I think the tools that we're building, the insights, the dashboards are all very heavily focused towards that, which is different than almost every other competitor. I would say while email is a competitive space, it's because email marketing is a competitive space because every single company from the coffee shop down the street. To clothing brands, to shoe brands, send emails with the goal of promoting sales and products and pushing volume. And so in transparency, we are going after the smaller side of the market. Like we aren't going after e-commerce yet, but that is why email is so competitive. And so when we were using Campaign Monitor and SaleThru at Morning Brew, those are tools fundamentally built for e-commerce primarily, but we were trying to use them differently and extract data Which required us to pull data into Looker and into Snowflake to be able to build dashboards that do audience development type work because their platform was built for sales and volume and tracking pixels and everything else, not content. And so I don't think it's a catch-all and safe assumption to say every email platform is going to have feature parity. So that's one. But I would say once we do reach quote unquote feature parity, like the missing functionality that we should have to compete with a lot of these other platforms, there's kind of like 2 different things. One is like, I think we have an extremely creative team. And that's what I've been saying for a while of like where the fun starts is we're not getting inbound of, hey, you're missing this feature. And then I'm stressed for 2 months while we build that feature, hoping we don't lose customers. We have everything that you would expect out of an email platform, and we can get super creative by listening to our content creators and our users and our publishers and be like, what would make your business 10x and what tools can we build to help you do that? And that's like a whole nother stage of growth, which we're starting to enter. are coming up in Q4. And then another, another part of it, which is so distanced to me because I'm so product and engineering and functionality based, is like marketing and perception and building a brand that people just want to associate with. Because at the end of the day, when every shoe brand is kind of the same, like Nike and Adidas and Reebok, functionally they're doing the same thing. It's the branding and marketing and who wears those types of shoes that makes you choose one pair of shoes over another. So I think it's a really interesting, because all of my stress has come from building in public and making up for functionality that we don't yet have, but we should. Once we address those, there's always optimizations to make the user experience better, to launch new features. But I do think it becomes a branding and marketing and perception of why are all the largest content creators and newsletters using Beehive? How are we the cool brand versus the legacy incumbents? And how do we continue to double down and provide value there, which is a whole different challenge, but a different one and very fun.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think after a while, like, I'm already foreseeing that future where you're going to fill up that, you know, finish at least to a decent extent of whatever missing pieces of the roadmap, you know, and then from there it really becomes a brand game, right? Like, and I think there is some promise from outside though, like, because I'm an absolute outsider, so I could share what I feel about Beehive. There is that what you touched on earlier, the creative spark and this like humor There is definitely a promise or a resonance that I feel about you guys that I don't think I have that kind of affiliation or sense of connection to other players in the game. They're more to me tools and they just get the job done. They're more like back office. I don't think about them. But I think ever since Milk Road and you wrote, remember you wrote a long-ass post about here's the Milk Road story. And I read that whole thing and it was really fun and there was a lightheartedness to that whole thing. And even though it was a case study, it didn't feel like you were selling hard. Or pushing hard or anything, and I think there's there's a lot of promise. I feel like fertile land for you to explore in terms of how do we keep this fun and lightweight. I feel like if I have to think of one or two other brands, Product Hunt does a great job of this, right? They're such a lighthearted the kitty, and they're like you know even though there's other discovery platforms you can find the next big thing, but Product Hunt remained sort of curious and fun for like the last ten years. So definitely double down. on that, you know, and it'll be fun. So switching back to— okay, this is actually a really fun sort of off tangent, but a relevant question. If you were not CEO of Beehive, part 2, what's the newsletter you'd be writing?

It's a great question. Funny enough, I write all of our product announcement emails that go out ideally.

You do? Really?

Yeah. No, I write all of them. I wrote the case study that you mentioned. Like, I actually do enjoy writing. And in building a remote company, that has kind of become like my superpower is overcommunicating. I just yesterday wrote like probably a 20-paragraph email, but like bullet pointed breaking down, because like we have a totally globally distributed team. Yeah. And everyone's kind of in their silo building this feature, working on this marketing, answering support tickets. And so in building a remote team, communication is like the key. And so I spend a few hours every week writing out all of my thoughts of here are the moving pieces, here's who's owning what, here's the timeline to launch When we launch this, here's the content, the blogs, the other initiatives that we are going to launch simultaneously. Like there's a million moving pieces. And so I say that as like one, that's like kind of the fun and overwhelming part of the job is as we scale and grow, and now we have about 30 people on the team, how do we keep that tenacity of launching things quickly and doing it well? And it is just organizing and ensuring everything is being launched on time. But I say all of that because like I have learned to love to write and communicate my thoughts. Mm-hmm. And so I actually thought that in building Beehive, I was going to launch a newsletter called Building Beehive, which was going to be like the behind the scenes, almost like Building in Public, but in newsletter form where I would send a weekly or a monthly, like, this is what we're working on in real time. So

I think even just a monthly would be really fun, right? Because, you know, I think if you want to cover more ground, a month would be the time, right? Because a week might be like too granular or too less, but a month would be a good time for you to also So reflect, and I would love to read it even if I'm not like, you know, fully plugged in. It would be great if you did that.

It'd be fun. I don't know if I answered your question. I don't— I, to be honest, I'm so heads down building this business. I have like other entrepreneurial ideas, but I don't entertain them.

What are some trends you're seeing? I think like, would— I guess if you were not actively building Beehive, would there maybe something in AI? Like what piques— what would pique your interest?

Yeah, I think— I mean, I have a lot of interest in like green technology and sustainability actually. So like my degree is mechanical. I love spending time outside. I'm a huge fan of just the earth, right? Like, I love nature. I love being in water. I love hiking and everything there. And so something around sustainability and green tech has always been interesting to me. So it's more like hard science and a little bit distant from what I'm doing right now, but it's an interest area that I pay attention to. But yeah, I mean, I did the 3.5 years at Morning Brew. I did my 10 months at Google and then went right back into the newsletter game and SaaS and building products and helping serve users. So that is like 99% of my bandwidth in terms of where I'm spending time.

Yeah. Of your focus and yeah, the mental brain share. So I have one more question. So what would you describe as the most underrated aspect about newsletters in your point of view? Because you live and breathe newsletters, right? I mean, you're building the tech for them and you see hundreds of newsletters on a weekly basis from your customers. And so you know a lot about the subject. So if an outsider Was warming up to the newsletter game, right? What do you think is still the most underrated aspect of newsletters and why?

Yeah, there's a few. I'd say like everyone has an email or uses email, right? So the addressable market is like the world. And so in order to grow an audience and hit your target users or people interested in following your content in a reliable way, like everyone is checking their email, whether it's checking into a flight, seeing receipts, conducting work, business, and then obviously checking for entertainment and news and resources and reading email. So one, like, the addressable market is massive. In the shift of other ways to grow an audience and reach a target audience, obviously social media stands out because of the upside of being able to grow quickly. The medium— it's amazing to be able to share videos and the algorithm can work in your favor, and you can have 10 followers on TikTok post an incredible piece of content that goes viral and become very well known. But you also don't control that algorithm. You don't know how it works, and you can't reliably get in front of that audience. And so when you post on Instagram, you have no idea, like, of your 1,000 followers, how many people are actually being served your post in their feed, and is it reliable? You're also at the hands of the business decisions of if they change the algorithms to focus on other types of content. So in the Instagram example, when they shift more towards video, if you're someone who posts still pictures for whatever reason, are you being deprioritized in the feed? And if you are a business or a publication that relies on those impressions to drive clicks or sales or revenue or influence, when they shift to Reels and now your static content isn't getting picked up, that could hit your bottom line very directly. The age-old example is Facebook where they had every business pour money into growing the likes on your business page as like you are when you post, hey, 50% off sale this week. And you had 10 million followers on your business page, you could guarantee that most of them were seeing that promotion. You were driving real sales. When they realized back in whatever year it was, 5, 6 years ago, that they actually don't want to be known for their business pages, but they want to lean into community and friends and relationships, they changed their algorithm. And those same pages that were getting millions of impressions saw that decreased overnight. And so now that's an audience that you've invested in curating and you can no longer get in front of them reliably. And if you don't have their emails, how are you getting in front of those millions of of people you've curated. So that's kind of like the downsides of social media and being at the hands of these different algorithms that aren't aligned with your expectation. Where with email, one, it's portable, right? So if you use Mailchimp, you can move to Beehive. If we don't do a good job at Beehive, you can move it back to Mailchimp or wherever you want, and that's totally fine. So those are your relationships. They're portable from platform to platform. It'd be like if you don't love how Instagram is performing and you moved your audience of followers from Instagram to TikTok or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever. So data Deliverability is huge. Being a hedge against algorithms and the feed and being able to say, when I send this email to 100,000 people, barring spam or something catastrophic happening, 100,000-ish people are going to receive this email in their inbox and be able to open it. And then the fact that it's such a robust medium in the sense of like, maybe it's not as sexy as like a video feed that's super interactive like a website, but you can add links that are top of funnel for your community. Yeah. For ads, for a premium subscription, for affiliate deals, for your new book that you're launching. It really is the ultimate top of funnel. And so there's a lot of bullcases for what you can do to, irregardless of what your business goals are. But having that direct relationship with your readers via email is really powerful and it unlocks a lot of doors.

Do you believe that every business on the planet should have an email newsletter?

Yeah, because I feel like it's so cheap, especially with tools like Beehive where like the barriers to entry are now so low that being able to collect an email Even if you don't know what you're going to do with that email, like you could go the content route and send something weekly or daily. You could have that email and promote different sales or a new community or a book launch. But I think there's a reason why every author starts collecting emails before they launch a book. And those who have a massive email list when they do launch a book always end up on the New York Times bestseller. Like it's a direct line of communication to people who already trust you. Right. So it really is if you do it well. And like one of my biggest regrets is like I don't have a massive email I keep saying I should, but there's enough other things taking my time and attention away from curating my own email.

That is also one of my regrets, man. I have like, well, over 50,000 on Twitter and like, you know, decent chunk on other platforms. But I really was so late to the email game. And I think it was maybe last year, September, where I finally said, all right, maybe I should really like kind of focus on the email collection. And by the time I also, it's like I was wondering because I think the difference I feel like, I don't know how you feel like the difference is like email is not instant gratification, unlike social media. That's the one barrier you have to kind of get around is that you're not— when you post something, even if you spend 20 hours on that deep dive, you know, Chanel, for example, she does a fantastic job on like newsletter creators and deep dives. Like, I bet she has like 10,000 audience or something. She probably— she gets 2 replies or 3 replies. That's the part that really disheartens me. I'm like, oh, I spent 20 hours on something and I only got— but people will read because a lot of people are quiet readers on email as opposed to the same tweet or thread. People will reply and engage and there's a little bit of back And forth. So yeah, email.

One thing that changed my life when I was at Morning Brew, when I saw, I don't remember how many subscribers we had, maybe a million, and there was 6 or 7 of us in this tiny office. And every time we pressed send, we made $50,000 in email. And I was like, wow, that is absolutely crazy. Because the input is the same. We still have one person on sales, one person on growth, me doing tech and product. product, and then we have 2 writers at that point, right? So the input of whether you're sending to 10 people or 10 million people is kind of the same in the sense of creating the content, making it look good, sending it out, and what you get in return. There's just such massive upsides that I just couldn't believe that we were putting in the same 8 to 9 hours of work a day to grow it and curate the newsletter. We send it out and then we would invoice our advertisers like $50K for each send. Wow. And it was at that moment where I that newsletters as a business is an incredibly profit and margin-rich business to go into.

Yeah, especially margin, right? Like the margins are crazy, like SaaS businesses, right? They're like, so I think I feel like a lot of people still haven't warmed up to the power of like something like the Milk Road story, right? Because like an average person in America doesn't really understand because small business owners, I think retail gets it, right? If I'm running a Gap Inc. store in Atlanta, which I am right now, I think retail people get it. They're like, oh yeah, give me your email address or your phone number. We'll send you a 25% coupon from there. They'll send you a campaign of 9, 10, 20, you know, sales coupons or whatever. But like, you know, like for example, the heating and air people, you know, who came and visited a while ago in our house, they didn't ask my email. They never emailed me. Right. But like to your point, like they could, you know, that most people I don't think think about email that way, you know, except retail. So, okay. So last sort of segment I have for you is a rapid-fire segment. All right. You ready for this? I know I didn't prepare you for this at the start of But I know you'll

answer your question. No, I'm not ready. So let's do it.

Yeah, you're not ready. Okay, good. That's exactly how I want it. Just kidding. Okay, rapid fire. I got 4 questions. And each of them is I want one line message for each of them. Ready? First one, your one line message for Beehive customers, whatever you want to say.

We help you grow and monetize better than any other platform that exists.

Your one line message for Beehive employees.

We are some of the most talented people in the world building really cool solutions to interesting problems.

And come join us. I was just kidding. Your one-line message for Beehive competitors?

It's a good one. Good luck.

Good luck. Watch out, right? Your one-line message for Beehive investors?

That I'm thankful that they trusted us and that I hope to return their investment many, many times over.

That was awesome. You're PR ready, man. You know, we could do— we could go take you to IPO. You seem like you're so ready. But also, like, one other question I had this— I know you You kind of went over it so quickly about the origin story, but at what point did you realize that Beehive could be a venture-backable business? Because Morning Brew, I don't think was it— was Morning Brew a VC-backable business?

They did friend, like a small friends and family round just to get it off the ground.

You clearly went and sought out like the normal, like, you know, like a full 10-year IPO sort of like the game, right? The VC-backable thing. What, at what point did you realize that this could be something like that?

So where we're heading in my 5, 10-year vision for the business has always been kind of pretty clear. And it's cool that we're a year and a half in and it's crystallizing to what I thought it could be. I've pretty outspokenly been like, I don't love the VC game and the hamster wheel of hit certain metrics, go to an A, hit certain metrics, go to Series B. I think it's so much more admirable when you can bootstrap a business And prioritize profitability, building like a strong, sustainable business. And so that was always my goal. My goal— the running joke is whenever we raise a round, I'm like, that's the last round we're ever raising because I don't want to raise more. I think that even though it sounds good, there are a lot of people that view that differently where they actually are looking— they're like, this will get us the next 18 months, we'll hit these milestones, and then we'll raise at a higher valuation. And that's like not the game we're playing. We hit profitability for a month back in April and May. Yeah, congrats. Awesome. Since raising more money, we've shifted towards hiring a bit more aggressively and focusing on growing a bit more. So we're a little bit under profitability right now, but should return Q1 of next year. But there was a few things. One, to get off the ground, we needed to pay a few large vendors like our email provider, hosting, and a few other things that are large upfront $75,000, $85,000 a year contracts. And just by nature of where I am in my life and career and my 2 co-founders, we couldn't front that money from prior whatever. So that was one reason why we like kind of needed to raise money. 2 is both my co-founders are married. There's just like a certain like lifestyle expectation of de-risking. And I also think it's great to know that if you're spending 60, 70, 80 hours a week building, not worrying about who's paying the bills, how is money coming in, is actually an advantage. Even though it's like glamorized as not taking money and eating like bare minimum ramen, whatever. Yeah, that's what's glamorized.

My question is, how do you care? How can you do ramen profitability when you have like kid, right? Like, it's like you can't feed— like, you know, you have to get diapers, you got to get a lot of things.

It sounds like a cooler, harder story, but at the end of the day, it just sounds very stressful and you're worried about other things instead of just focusing on the business. So I say all of that because, like, we had upfront vendors we had to pay, we wanted salaries, we wanted to attract really talented people, and we knew the way to compete in a very competitive industry is to hire the best of the best who expect certain salaries and benefits. So we kind of needed some capital to get off the ground. And then that was like our early— not MVP stage, but like, let's get the product-market Once we hit product market fit, it was like, oh shit, we could hire 4 or 5, 6 more people and really accelerate, or we're falling behind because we know we're missing these 3 things that we need. Yeah. We could go the slow way, which might take a year to build those, in which case it's a lot of stress because people are churning because we don't offer those features yet. Or we could raise a little bit more money and just get there quicker. So we chose that route. And then the Series A was really just a, we know what we have. We went from 0 to $4 million ARR in about 18 months. Months. We have product market fit. We have a great roadmap. We have really talented people. We now can't lose based on being outcapitalized by the competitors. And other competitors have tried to step in and almost pay for our users to migrate. There's other aggressive tactics that we were at a fundamental disadvantage because we didn't have as much capital. And I was like, it's so hard to get where we are with traction and growth and team where it would suck to lose because we are just undercapitalized relative relative to the industry. So the Series A gave us a very strong foundation. We've doubled the team size, we're firing on all cylinders, and now I fundamentally believe we will not raise again because we should hit profitability back again in early 2024 and then just building better margins and a more sound business.

Awesome. I love the vision and I love the sort of discipline too. You know, I think it's very, it's very refreshing to see someone so disciplined to keep that profitability top of mind. I mean, right now the market outside is like that. I get it. But like, Even like 4 or 5, 6 years down the line, like to kind of think about that and be like, all right, we got to keep this lean is very important, you know? So awesome, you know, great work and excited for, you know, following along and sort of tracing your journey, man. You know, congrats on the success so far. $4 million, not a joke. $4 million ARR. Great work. Like I said at the beginning before we started this, I'm still in awe of your shipping velocity, the team and you. So as long as you keep that on and you— as long as you're like approachable and building in public, like you said, it's just such It's going to be a winning game. So

I think that's what we started recording too, is like, it's fun to follow the journey. And I think there's a difference between building in public because it's okay to say what you're working on and maybe inspires other people. My goal on top of that, and hopefully educating and inspiring other people to build things, is to make it fun. It's a source of entertainment. It's, we hit these milestones, this is what we're launching. Here's an area we're struggling. Here are some people we hired. So I think what you said is like why building in public can be so fun. It really is to make it enjoyable to watch our journey and feel like you're a part of the journey from the outside.

Yeah. And I also want to acknowledge and appreciate your vulnerability. You know, like about 20, 30 minutes ago when I asked you a kind of difficult question about reflect on some of your obstacles, you were like very open and very sort of direct about that. Right. I think that's just great to me. A lot of people would like kind of duck around it. Right. So just loving your journey and rooting for you, man. You know, all the best. Where do you want to send people to? Beehive.com? Or do you have any—

Sure. Beehive on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Or if you want to follow the Build in Public journey, I think I'm probably the face of that. So dank_tweets. Follow me on Twitter.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Tyler. It was great having you here and I hope to see you again in a future session again.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Thank you.