#106 | How To Build a Profitable Newsletter and Compete In A Crowded Market - Tyler Denk

What blew my mind at Morning Brew and like, the numbers have clearly changed, but being able to press send and print $80,000 of advertising revenue, I mean, the amount of money is pretty crazy. And I think that's why there has been this newsletter boom in the past few years. Some people say they want to start a daily newsletter. And my first reaction is, do you know how much work that is? And responsibility? Like, start with once a week. Hey, what's up? I'm Tyler Dank. I'm the CEO and co founder of Beehive, and you're listening to the Next Generation Podcast.

You're listening to the Next Generation Podcast.

Weekly interviews with the most interest, interesting and successful 20 somethings out there.

Tyler, welcome to the show, brother. Excited to have you on.

Excited to be here.

How are we doing good so far? Well, actually, I mean, we're busy. I was gonna say we're chatting before actually not doing that. Awesome. But I'm excited to be chatting with you. I know it's been a long time coming. We had two separate schedulings. I think you had a work emergency. And then I got crazy sick last week. So excited to actually be recording this podcast today. Um, I wrote down the first thing that I wanted to say. Kind of dive into in this conversation here because I'd really love to get your opinion on this. Like, usually it takes us like 20 to 30 minutes to like really get into the meat of a conversation, but I feel like with you specifically and what you're working on with Beehive, like, we're just going to run out of conversation or we're going to run out of time. If that happens. I want to kick things off by saying, like, email marketing software has got to be the most saturated industry, like, period in the software space. And like, if you actually look at like any of these like matrices, matrixes or whatever they are, like, you'll see, like, there's thousands of email marketing softwares. I would love to know, like, if somebody came up to me last year, I was like, I'm gonna start an email marketing company. I'd be like, that's just a bad idea. Like, it already exists, but you guys are crushing it. And so you guys are doing like a phenomenal job. I'd love to know, like, why in the first place you even wanted to start another email software company.

Yeah, I mean, it's for sure super competitive. I just got a message from an investor yesterday, but an ESP I've never even heard of is doing 100 million ARR and it's just like I don't even know where they're operating and they're killing it. So very competitive space for sure. I feel like the background's pretty important. Like, I came from Morning Brew. That was like my primary experience before this. And so started built on like a custom website that we built in house. We use like different email software, so we use mailchimp and then campaign monitor and then sell through. But like everything in between and outside of that was custom built. So we had built our own website, our own templates. We built a referral program to help stimulate growth. We built a content management system for the writers to use, partly because I was 22, 23 and naive, and partly just because a lot of the content management systems were built for web. And there was like this new wave, I think Morning Brew kind of led of email first media property. There was a scam before us.

And.

Then the hustle and Axios after us, and now there's a bunch of them. But I think email really came into its own where most of the software built for content management systems and content in general. Online was maybe web first. So we built our own cms and then later we built our own ad management platform where we were managing six or seven newsletters. We'd have two advertisers per newsletter going seven days a week and a lot of fulfillment management and reporting. So kind of long way of saying there was like this entire ecosystem that we had built in house and we were always being the good thing about emails. You can reply to any given email, get in contact with the person who sent it. And so we would have a team of interns that would read through all of the replies and they'd say a lot of people are interested in this referral program. A lot of people want to know how you built this cms. So to answer your question more directly of why I was crazy enough to think that I could build an email platform, a lot of it came from just demand of one. Seeing the success of Morning Brew and then seeing the interest level from other people, primarily the audience of Morning Brew, which had their own newsletters in their own right, taking an interest in what we had built and being one of the, I'd say, people who helped build all that internal tech, it kind of showed me that I saw the playbook and I saw the upside. So if there's a way to productize it, like there was an opportunity there.

It kind of sounds like you might be the perfect person to have started this, at least coming from that kind of Experience standpoint of seeing, you know, an email newsletter company scale and then being on the backside, did you approach it from like you have a technical background experience or did you kind of find a technical co founder or how did that conversation initially start once you're like, hey, you know, let's start building our own platform here?

Yeah, there's a few things there. One, I am like a self taught developer so I did mechanical engineering in college but taught myself to code also in college and started a company then with two buddies. So that was like my first experience of like the startup build it yourself from scratch. So I've always kind of had that scrappier mentality of being able to build something. And then my two co founders are both software engineers that were also at Morning Brew as well. So they were plugged into the ecosystem and building those tools. So very familiar. So we have a technical team of three co founders which definitely helps a lot. And coming from that ecosystem. And then to your point, I think that's what differentiates us a lot from the competition is I'm not really building a roadmap that's copying Platform X, Platform Y. I saw what worked and we tried a million things and I know what doesn't work in helping move the needle for Morning Brews growth and success. And so we are kind of building out a roadmap of what I have seen that proved to scale Morning Brew to three and a half million subscribers and beyond leading up to their acquisition. And that's like a pretty solid roadmap of a year and a half plus there. And obviously we pay attention to the competition and there's different features and functionalities that's out there. But I think we're fairly unique in the perspective that we're going about building this.

I mean it definitely seems like the target that you guys are going after is also kind of somewhat unique, right? Like it's not. You're not hitting E commerce people, you're not hitting generic newsletter. Like I think you fill into that kind of techie personal branding or like newsletter focused websites which I don't think there's really a lot of people there.

Well, I feel like the smart framework that you guys approach it for is like okay, here's this massive tam, like a massive market which is email marketing as a whole. And then like do that but for niche thing, right? So like Klaviyo has built an incredibly large business just by going after email for E commerce, right. Mailchimp, maybe more like email for small business. And then you guys are Kind of going after, correct me if I'm wrong, but like email for creators or like solo publishers. How would you phrase that?

I'd say that we kind of started in that lane of like the solo. Whether it's a hobbyist or like an individual content creator, we're definitely going more upmarket into bringing on big time publisher, big time publishers. So whether it's like the next morning brews or like idealistically, the platform we're building should be able to support a morning brew in its own right, but also legacy publishers as well. So I won't name drop because they're going to be announced in the next few weeks. But some very large, like globally known publications are onboarding onto the platform and so going up market I think is very interesting to me. I would say though, to your point of like email marketing, which is a massive industry because every company needs to be able to market their products and services, we are definitely picking a fairly niche lane to start, which is primarily content driven newsletters, which is a fraction of email in general. But I think if we can do that really well, one, it is still a massive market and the derivative to jump from content focused newsletters to email marketing is fairly similar. And so I'd rather kind of carve out a real competency there and then.

Expand on that note of kind of market sizing. It might be helpful if you maybe give some context in terms of what size you guys are at, how long you've been in business. Maybe a couple metrics around that.

Yeah. So we launched mid November of 2021. This is being recorded mid October, so about 11 months since launch. We have, we're approaching 20,000 sign ups. We have thousands of active newsletters on the platform, sending weekly, daily, monthly. We have scaled revenue 30% every single month since launch and are quickly approaching a 1 million ARR in our first year, which is pretty exciting.

That's awesome.

And yeah, that's kind of like where we are now, like definitely very nascent. Like there's a lot to build and we're still kind of building out like our initial roadmap of what we had set out to do. But very thankful for early adopters who kind of adopted the platform well before they probably should have and stuck with us. And hopefully they're being rewarded with that because I think what we have already built and what's coming up in the next few months is pretty exciting.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I feel like I see you guys shipping just new product features almost on a weekly basis at this Point. Which is insane.

Yeah, I mean, it helps having three technical co founders, it helps hiring four additional engineers, and then it also helps knowing, like, again, we know what worked well at Morning Brew. So the roadmap was already kind of there. A lot of us had built the same or similar tools at Morning Brew. How do we do it now better and make it accessible for anyone to plug in, rather than just a single team? And so it helps with a lot of that context and experience. But yeah, we're definitely. The name of the game is Product Velocity because, like, as you mentioned, it's a competitive space, and when people move over and they expect XYZ functionality and you don't have it, you either pull it very quickly or you lose that customer. And so we're trying to go with the former.

Why? Why raise money in the first place? Because you guys did raise a little bit of cash for, like, getting everything started. Am I right in saying that?

Yeah, we raised 2.6 million last summer, a few months before we officially launched, and then we just raised an additional 1.6.

Did you need to do that in order to build the team you want and really go and scale, or was there a world where you could be as successful as you are today and kind of reach the success that you guys want to get to without venture funding?

Yeah, a few things, I guess, to what I just said. We scout our engineering team to six to seven pretty quickly. And if the answer is we need to build features very quickly to onboard users or go very slowly at risk of churning users or just not being enticing enough of a product, like, we definitely need the product to be in a certain place to continue that momentum. And that requires paying fairly expensive engineers to build a really quality product, which I don't think we could have done out of pocket. And then also just like software vendors and everything else, like, whether it's AWS or like the email platform that we're built on top of which is Twilio, SendGrid, and being able to like, pay all those contracts to send millions of emails, typically their enterprise contracts at upfront, 60, 70, $80,000 a year. So pretty hefty startup costs to get started. Is there a way to. Was there a possible way to bootstrap and do it as a side project and slowly ramp up? Probably, but I'm a big one. I'm pretty impatient. And I'm also like, right time, right place. Like, I saw an opportunity in the market to really expedite, and as you said, it's a very competitive market. And you people see kind of what we're working on, if they can get there first or build XYZ feature that they see as an opportunity. I don't be a laggard in the space. I'd rather have people copy us. And it's been pretty cool to see some of the larger competitors copy a lot of what we're doing. And we're five years younger than them. So it's been, it's been fun.

It's like that feeling of knowing, like, you're doing all the right stuff. So, like, it makes sense to me that you would raise because it kind of gives you like that feature parity pretty quickly and if anything, like, you can jump ahead in terms of where you want to be from a development standpoint. Is there a world where. Because I guess the biggest bootstrapped sweetheart in the last two decades has probably been mailchimp and they just sold for a ridiculous sale price. Intuit, I believe it was. But is there a world then where, okay, you raised a little over 3 million, close to 4 million or something like that at this point in funding, and now you've kind of gotten to the point where, Great, you're approaching 1 million ARR, you're growing 30% month over month, your growth is definitely accelerating quickly. Is there a world where you want to go and say, cool, let's just keep going now with like all the profits and reinvest that because we kind of have our base covered pretty quickly? Or do you see like the next three to five years with headlines of like, Sequoia backs, you know, new email marketing software Beehive? What's your vision for that?

Yeah, I mean, my goal is to never raise again for a lot of reasons, like whether it's dilution, whether it's going through the process and where I'd rather spend my six weeks of time building product and working with users and customers over talking to VCs and going through that whole ordeal. But I also think we're at a point where we could break even if we continue with the growth probably sometime early in 2023 with a lot of padding already in the bank. And so I think we can reinvest that money and continue to accelerate. My. I don't and like seeing the pace at which we are able to ship. I just don't know once we are profitable and they're continue to hire who we need to hire, why we need to raise money. I've obviously heard the counter argument by a lot of VCs of you can hire quicker and more people and do more sooner and really reach that escape velocity, which I hear. But then I've also seen us with a team of three, four engineers get to almost feature parity in 10 months time. And so I'm pretty confident in the quality of people that we have and think that if there's a route and a path forward to not raise money, that's definitely my preference.

You raised some money before you launched the product, correct?

Yeah, there was like a 2, 3 month gap of raising money so we could go full time and pay ourselves before actually launching the product.

What did that process look like? That is pretty interesting. When you, when you see founders that are able to either have those connections or the background, I'm assuming they probably trusted your background significantly. Coming from Morning Brewing, what was that process like actually raising the money before the product was launched and having, you know, hey, this is how many people we have. Did you have potentially some content creators that maybe agreed to sign up beforehand or was it really just pitching them on that vision of what the product would be?

Yeah, both. Raising money is a weird thing. Especially like the earlier stage, the more gray area and it's like, it's very wild how much investors just trust what you say. Not that I said anything dishonest, but like for example, part of the pitch was I did like, hey, this is what we're building, this is when it's launching. Are you interested? Put in your information, Kind of like a legion pre launch, like type, form type thing just to gauge is there an interest in the market for this more for our sake. But then Obviously with like 400 responses, we turned around to different investors and said, here's like our background. So background and credibility is definitely the primary thing that we raised on. It's we have built this at Morning Brew. There was clear appetite at Morning Brew. We have an incredibly talented, smart like technical team of co founders and a CTO at the time. And so like we already have a path forward and here's the hypothesis. So that's like I'd say 80% of the fundraise, but the validation of, oh, we have 400 people that signed up and showed interest in joining the platform pre launched, pre. Anything from a single tweet was kind of like the validation that they were looking for granted. Like I say it's like a gray area because like not a single investor asked like, can I see that sheet? Or like is there actually 400 people? Or like, did you make this entire thing up? There's like a Lot of trust there. Which I've always thought was interesting.

Just all the Twitter bots.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, just raising money in general. Like, even I'm in fundraiser and I'd quote our revenue numbers and growth and there was literally zero. Can I see that stripe account? Can I validate any of this? So, I mean, maybe I'm just a trustworthy person. Like, I was honest obviously throughout the process, but it just, it's something that I've taken note of during my two experiences fundraising. How much? It's just word of mouth and trusting the person. That's what they're saying.

But I was surprised in terms of Connor and I just went through refinancing a couple of properties and obviously significantly different going, I think, the venture capital route versus standard, you know, real estate mortgage route. But like, every once in a while I'd be surprised by either the lack of questions or lack of verification that some of the banks would need and be like, hey, yo. Okay, this is what you guys are saying your net worth is. That's fine. I was like, well.

I also wonder too, for what it's worth, it sounds like, Tyler, it was just over a year ago that you closed that first round of funding and then what was it four months ago that you closed the second round? Yeah, like, I also. And same with us, bank wise, like four or five. Four months ago, I guess, was probably the bulk of when a lot of these term sheets were actually going and like, getting, getting actually settled. I do think it would probably be a different environment today if I had to guess right. Like, people just wanted to go and get access to, like, deals and everything like that. Back then, like, there was just so much money being thrown around everywhere. I would imagine in times when, like, money's a little bit tighter and people are a little bit more nervous that it would be less trust based, more verification based, but I don't know that for sure.

Yeah, I mean, I saw both ends of that when we raised last August, last July. Like, times were great and money was very easy to come by. And like, we filled that round with interest fairly quickly. Again, like the whole psychology of fundraising, no one wants to be first money and no one touched it. People are like, oh, that's interesting. But, like, I don't know if I see the vision or if you guys can pull it off. But then as soon as we got our lead investor, social leverage to buy in, then everyone, like, poured in fairly quickly. And it was the easiest thing to fundraise once you start the conversation with. We're actually already kind of like overallocated. They could just end the call there and be like, we're in. So that's always like an interesting psychological dynamic, which, I mean isn't news. I think any founder that's gone through the process has seen that. But then we went out and raised again. It was May 2022. Market was definitely going south very quickly. Tons of uncertainty everywhere. And what I thought is definitely not de risk by any means. We're still a seed stage company, but product, market, fit, clear traction, revenue and growth and everything up and to the right. We just started paying like maybe a couple hundred dollars a week, if that, on acquisition. But there was a point our first 10,000 users, $0 paid acquisition, doing north of like 20k a month with not having to pay a dollar for marketing. I felt like a seed company to raise a mill and a half, $2 million, like fairly good bet to make. And I was wrong. Maybe whether it was us or the market or whatever, but our most recent fundraise took a good six to eight weeks when I thought it'd be like a two week process.

I wonder too because like the original fundraise that you did, you guys didn't really have any revenue, any product, whatever. And so like I remember hearing from someone in the past, I forget who it was saying that when you first go out and start raising money, if you don't really have anything and you're just selling on the dream and vision, oftentimes it's almost easier than selling off of nine to 12 months worth of work and some revenue. Because if it's some revenue, they see, oh, $200,000 and they're like, okay, that's something. Whereas in their mind you're selling this bigger picture when there's nothing there and they're like, how big can this be? So I got to applaud the fact that doing it ahead of time is probably the right move because you didn't have to necessarily have this crazy outcome for people to go and get excited about it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean as soon as you have revenue, the savvy investors definitely try to pull like, okay, here's the ARR number. Like give it like a 5 to 7 multiple and you're looking at a 2 million valuation. So how are you trying to reason for a 20 million valuation? So yeah, the more revenue you have, the more they'll try to pull it into some sort of multiple. And the multiples, I mean the truth is like early stage companies in general, probably pre series A, just Don't make sense. And so like there's definitely a dissonance there.

But yeah, there's some poor analysts working at the VC company trying to figure out the underwriting model for like a pre seed company. Oh yeah, this is going to be.

The growth rate, the amount of users.

Added every month and none of it's going to add up, but definitely just kind of a bet on you. I'm curious, so you said you guys got 10,000 people without really any acquisition or paid acquisition. What did that kind of look like in terms of the initial acquisition funnel? You had the list of 400 when you guys launched. Did a bunch of those people convert and then it was just a ton of word of mouth or what did that look like?

Yeah, of the 400 we had in that list, maybe 30 to 50 converted, which I mean was like an expected drop off in general. It was also like a three month delay and then when we got the market it was like, you can do this but you can't do these 10 other things because we just launched. So I mean I don't blame them. But yeah, like 30, 40 early. We had some beta users. I'd say we benefited from a few different things. One is we strategically raised money from about 30 angels that either have a newsletter, a large audience on Twitter, some sort of like media background who were influential in that space. So definitely benefited from like being fortunate enough to have a great network of people that I have met at my time in New York and at Morning Brew and like that was an incredible unlock for us. And then like the product led growth of here's the roadmap. I know the pain points of newsletters and content creators. So we're going to build tools and solutions to solve them. We're going to create blog posts broadcasting all the new features we just launched on like a weekly or bi weekly basis. And then I turned to these strategic investors who have massive audiences on Twitter and have them promote that and retweet it and engage and like. So the network effects of product led growth, shipping at a very high velocity and then having a lot of influential people in your corner to help broadcast that, that's been like kind of the winning formula for us of where we've been able to get. And then there's always just like classic growth hacks built into the product. So whether people will screenshot and share their growth, whether we add automations to show like hey, you grew by 800 subscribers this week. Share to Twitter, the footer of every email has like published on Beehive. So just the compounding network effects of more users bring more impressions to Beehive, which bring more users. So there's economics and scale built into kind of the business that we're in. And then again, we also benefit from content creators and publications have a large audience by nature, like that's what they do. And so when they are happy with a product or feature or they recommend whatever, the fact that they have an audience to already broadcast that message too has definitely helped benefit us.

Yeah, I would imagine that specifically the angel investors with their large audiences in the beginning is like a ton of social proof to kind of get the ball moving there. I remember when I worked back at this software company called Drift. Now they sell to big enterprise accounts and all of that, but back then they had a free plan where you could just basically put live chat on your site and in the bottom it would say powered by Drift or whatever. And I want to say it was like 20 to 30% of all of their paid customers. The initial referral came from that powered by kind of growth hack in the actual module when they were selling to free plan. So like definitely a cool way to kind of think about like growing the audience. Is that like, is that powering a lot of your guys new signups now or where are they coming from today?

Yeah, I mean we group that as like referral and it's definitely probably one of the largest channels. If we onboard a newsletter that sends to 100,000 people and then the next day when they send their first newsletter one, like hopefully it looks a lot better because we have pretty good design tools. Hopefully deliverability is great and it hits more people's inboxes and then they scroll down to the bottom and see that it was like built with Beehive. It's 100,000 new impressions. Now knowing what Beehive is, the click through and call to actions right there. And so yeah, that's a pretty strong growth driver for us. But it all kind of like builds on itself, right? So the fact that we make it really easy to customize your newsletter and make it look great. Ideally someone goes from platform A to Behive and their readers immediately see like an enhanced, better styled newsletter. And that kind of raises the eyebrow in general of like what changed. And if you do a little bit of digging, you can find out that they're using us and that helps. But I mean again, everything kind of comes down to product LED growth. I think, I think the classic saying is that first time founders think about product and repeat founders Think about distribution, but I'm like the stereotypical, like the product needs to be amazing and I think the bar is fairly low in this space. It's very competitive, but I think there's a lot of clunky enterprise email software. And when you onboard to our experience and the UI is super seamless, that there's tons of customization. It's built with creators in mind and growth and data. But it's not overwhelming. Like, we're very careful about the experience that we create on the platform. And I think it's like a 180 from a lot of the enterprise software that people are used to. And I think that is a pretty large reason for like the early success.

It's perfect when your incentive alignment works well with your customer and you hand in hand. Right. Your customer's getting more people that are viewing their newsletter. You guys are getting more customers. You want to keep making sure that they get people on. It's a fairly seamless synergy to that respect. How are you guys distributed now on a work basis? Everyone's fully remote, I think from what I've seen on the job listings. And is that the plan going forward and are there kind of any struggles you've seen with trying to manage that?

Not at all. We're totally remote. I used to be the biggest office person ever. I was probably the grumpiest person in America when like day one of like being remote because I don't know, in a tiny New York City apartment, like didn't have a desk. So I sat on my couch and I love going in the office, meeting people, having the cold brew tap and everything. I've made such a 180 and like once you invest in a setup, you have have your desk. You don't have to commute, you don't have to sweat on the subway. Like, being able to be in your own environment and work, like I'm a huge fan of personally, I think the team loves the flexibility. So we have people in New York, North Carolina, Texas, California, wherever. So we're totally remote. We're very flexible with work hours in general. So if you prefer to be a night owl and work till 2am and you get on at 11am the next day, like, that's fine. We have like a monthly wellness day. So the third Friday of every month is a day off. I picked that up from my short time at Google. Sundar was doing like during the pandemic, like take a Friday off like every two months as like a mental health day. And everyone loved it. So we do that every month. And I mean I'm a big fan of just like work life balance in general, although I don't have much of that yet. I'm striving to get more of that. But the hope is eventually, like I'm a huge fan of like a four day work week and just giving more time to people to do what they want. So I think it's hard early as a startup to say, hey, we're only going to work four days a week. Like we have a lot to build and a lot to prove. But the hope is soon, maybe 2023, we can kind of shift and more into like a four day work week.

So you've had reasonable success growing the team. Sounds like it's worked really well, keeping everyone remote, tons of signups, raised money successfully and continued to raise money. I'm assuming there's probably not just a bunch of, you know, butterflies and flowers, anything kind of that stands out to you that might have been significantly more difficult or stressful, that might not be so obvious on the surface or some decent sized challenges you guys have been attacking?

Yeah, I mean when you zoom out 10,000ft and like look at the journey, like it does look up and to the right and great and the metrics are great the day to day, like there's, there's no bullshitting it. Like it's extremely stressful. Like we have users around the world, we're getting hundreds of support tickets, we answer all of them like inbox zero every day. But it's just like a constant push and pull of providing an incredible experience for users. Also, like people are trusting us to like they're moving their business off of another platform. And a lot of these content creators, like this is their revenue, like whether it's a premium subscription that they charge or how they communicate to their users and customers, like they are trusting us to run their business on our software. And I don't take that lightly. And so if the site, which very rarely it has happened, has ever gone down for five or 10 minutes, like we hear about it and like it impacts people and like that is as stressful as it can possibly get. There's like classic scaling issues with like database, like anything that any tech company works with. But you go into a week saying here's the three things we're going to build and then 15 new things come out of nowhere and that's actually where you're spending your time. Like that's incredibly stressful. Again, something I think every SaaS and tech company has experienced you tell a user we think this is going to launch end of month, 15 things come up, you don't even start. The thing that you said was going to launch end of month and that's incredibly frustrating leads to churn. Losing users in general is always like. I'm like, I have my finger way too close on the pulse of everyone who churns and I email every single one of them to get feedback, but that always sucks. And I mean, we also lost our CTO tragically in May and going through an experience of someone who we looked up to and like, was probably the most critical person on our team to like lose a friend and like the leader of the engineering team and be able to backfill that, like that was by far the most difficult situation I've been in. So I'd say in the 10, 11 months we've been doing this, there's been incredible highs, but I've also definitely had the lowest of lows along the way. So it's what every entrepreneur says with staying level is easier said than done, but very necessary.

Yeah, it's not all just 30 month over month growth and the close to 1 million ARR. It's like all of the shit that goes on beneath the scenes of that to get there. Like this definitely takes a toll. I would love to maybe just take a second to shift over segments a little bit because I think right now we've chatted a lot about the actual building of the SaaS product and I want to kind of switch it over to more just like high level industry stuff of like who you're building for. And I think you've mentioned like you're going a little bit more upmarket, probably bringing on some bigger publications. I got a chance to grab coffee this week with one of the past guests, Jack Rains. He runs Young Money and it's all on Beehive. And I know he's a big evangelist for the product too. And like during this 60 minute meeting he just started going off on like all of the different people who are running newsletter first businesses and they can be like an individual person and how much money they're making on all of it. And I like, it blew my mind, I don't know why. In my mind I was like, oh yeah, they make money, they earn a decent amount from ad revenue or whatever. And then he's talking, I won't say names because I feel like it might be a little intrusive, but he's talking about individuals making like 50 to $100,000 per cent for an individual, he's talking about people that are just starting. They don't have a ton of subscribers or anything like that. And they'll make 1 to $2,000 per cent for a relatively smaller list. But if it's like n enough, then they can charge those kind of CPMs. Like, have you seen, you must see this more than anybody else, I would imagine.

Yeah, well, two things. One, we do like the premium newsletter route as well. So if you're charging subscriptions, that's all run through Stripe, which we integrate with. And so we see that directly, not that there's like a black market like Jack Reigns gets advertising deals kind of off platform, which we fully support. Like, we just want our content creators to be able to monetize however they can. And so, like, I don't see the exact rates. I've seen the upside, obviously, being at Morning Brew of my biggest takeaway in life is I wish that I collected emails when I was five years old because what blew my mind at Morning Brew and like, the numbers have clearly changed. But being able to press send and print $80,000 of advertising revenue with like the same team that you had maybe two years prior because, like, the output is consistent, right. If you are a daily recap or business news or like an analysis of politics or whatever you're writing about, you could write that with one person or two people, but like, that's pretty consistent as you scale and the quality of the audience goes up, the size of the audience goes up and the CPMs that you can warrant to charge advertisers goes up. I mean, the amount of money is pretty crazy. And I think that's why there has been this newsletter boom in the past few years.

Who, who are some of the people that you see doing it might not be crazy, obvious or like as well known that you just think are crushing it and then follow up on that. Like, what are some opportunities that you see in that space for maybe somebody who's listening to this right now that is thinking to themselves, damn, should I start a newsletter and like some cool ways that they can go and monetize it or like build opportunities there.

Maybe also like categories around?

Yeah, I mean, I would say when we first launched and like unintentionally, some of the biggest content categories was like crypto web3nft. Because that was like again a year and a half ago, end of 2021, what everyone was talking about and everyone was just flipping monkeys and making hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I would say like a lot of the Content was driven by, like, advertiser interests and, like, just mainstream interest in general. Like, there was a time when the big crypto companies like FTX and whoever else are spending, there was no limit to the amount they would spend to get in front of an audience that could eventually become a customer to be on their exchange. So there's, like, a lot of money there, and I think a lot of content kind of follows where the money is. That's probably cooled a bit recently. Another big one, like, sports do really well, and so, like, fairly commoditized from, like, a subject matter. But as sports gambling becomes more mainstream and legalized in more states, the amount of money that sportsbooks like Caesars, DraftKings, whatever are willing to pay to get you to be a lifetime user on their sportsbook is very high. And so there's tons of advertising dollars flowing there as well. So there's a lot of money to be made, I think. And again, this is where I think some competitors have missed historically, the advertising dollars. And granted, it's like drying up a bit now, I think is a massive opportunity. I think it's really hard to do a premium subscription newsletter. To be able to have your content be the product that people are paying for and to deliver on a regular basis, where they continue to pay you monthly, I think is really difficult. We have some content creators who are killing it and doing an amazing job. And I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the larger content creators in general, like Ben Thompson. And Stratacheri is kind of like the OG who's making millions off of his newsletter now podcast. But, yeah, I mean, it's a hustle. And I think that's the one thing that people maybe overlook is like, creating. Some people say they want to start a daily newsletter, and my first reaction is, do you know how much work that is? And responsibility, like, start with once a week. But, yeah, I mean, to your point, there's a lot of money in the space. There's a lot of ways to monetize, too, right? So advertising has been, like, tried and true for decades. Premium subscriptions, I think Ben Thompson kind of led the way there. Substack launch, normalized that a lot. So premium subscriptions is pretty huge. But then there's affiliates, there's job boards, there's community. Like, there's so many ways to monetize where I feel like email is kind of like the lifeline or the whatever you want to call it to really reach your audience. And from having a core email base, you can go off in so many different directions and experiment with things. And to Jack Rain's point, he's crushing it. And a lot of other content creators are.

If you had to be on the other side of this equation, not running Beehive, but sat down and said, all right, I'm going to make a popular newsletter over the next two years. What would that look like? What sort of category do you think you'd pick?

The. So I feel like kind of going against everything I just said because, like, be smart and like, savvy from like a monetization standpoint, I would probably think of, like, where the dollars are and like, how can I. What's the big picture of where I think I could squeeze the most revenue out of like a newsletter entity, out of personal interest? The newsletters that I like the most or, like, more deep dive analysis on just, like, topics that I find interesting. So I brought up Ben Thompson a lot. But, like, I love the deep dives in tech that, like, I don't get from like, a short recap of what's happening in business news. But, like, going a step deeper, there was another newsletter. Now I'm just name dropping newsletters. But like, the margins, which is, I think pretty inconsistent now they just pick up random things about whether it's interest rates or like Uber or the, I don't know, share economy, and they just kind of like have their personal take. I think I'm interested in investing in people and hearing what they have to say. I think that is a little bit more interesting to me and I think I have a lot of thoughts and I would like to share them. So it's been on my to do list to spin up my own newsletter and just talk about stuff like that for a while, but haven't found the time, believe it or not.

Yeah, understandable. I'd love to know. Also, in terms of everything you're working on right now, you guys are crushing it. You're growing really quickly and you just definitely seem. You give off the vibe that you're very focused, you're very driven. I'd love to maybe learn what exactly it is that's motivating you right now to try to grow Beehive as quickly as you guys have been. Right. Like, and, and for what it's worth, like, no judgment, like, if it's, if it's just like, I want to have a huge exit one day and make a ton of money, like, that's a totally fair, like, motivate. Motivator. Right? Is there something that's like Kind of keeping you driven. I'm like, building out this team and trying to really grow the product as fast as you have.

Yeah, talk about a loaded question. I mean, there's a lot there, right? So I've always wanted to build a company and a startup and, like, I've been obsessed with, like, Silicon Valley. I grew up reading TechCrunch all high school, all college. So, like, the startup lifestyle and building something meaningful and impactful is something I've always wanted. I hate losing. I'm like, super competitive. And, like, the drive that I have right now to make this a massively successful company is, like, unparalleled. And, like, I want it more than anything. And so I don't know how long that motivation lasts for, truthfully. And so for me to say, like, while I'm 28 years old right now and I have this drive, I don't have a family, I don't have any other dependencies. Like, I can put in 14, 15 hours a day and do everything I can to make this successful. So that's like one layer to it, what that leads to. Maybe a huge exit, maybe an ipo. Like, I haven't thought too much about that. I'd love to be buyers, not sellers. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity if we can execute where we can purchase some companies that I think would expand our offering and portfolio. I'm not necessarily looking to scale this up and get sold anytime soon, but then like, a layer deeper as you build out the company and like, you grow your user base, like I DM dozens of users every week. And like, building a product and a platform that is net positive for their lives and businesses and the. They maybe don't have a technical background. And so for them to be able to build their business the way that they see that they could, they need to leverage a platform that allows XYZ customization and flexibility and monetization tools. And so being able to provide solutions where they can attain and achieve their goals, they can monetize and make a living or supplemental income, like, that's really powerful to me. Like, it's one thing to build something that is like, a cool little product that people waste time on and like, get entertainment, but the fact that our product actually connects people, drives revenue, helps advance people's careers is, like, very impactful for me. So it's kind of like a network effect there. So those are like, a few of the main reasons. Like, I don't know if that.

Yeah, just a few of the reasons. Maybe kind of on, like, a more personal note, like, what do you think you'd be doing right now from a hobby standpoint? Maybe if. I don't know either. A like, assuming if you had unlimited money right now, how do you think you'd be spending your time if you couldn't be running a company?

So there's like, a classic answer I've been thinking about. And then I know my personality type and it's like the complete opposite. But I kind of have learned to think that, like, true wealth and luxury is being able to wake up and have no idea where your phone is or computer and just kind of be like, oh, maybe I'm gonna go do yoga right now, or surf or get a smoothie. But, like, not being tied to something that pulls you into some sort of hustle. And like, one, you have to have probably a decent amount of wealth or luxury to be in a situation like that. But I think it's just the 180 of what I am now. I wake up at 5:45am I checking Slack immediately go through, like, in reverse order of, like, the worst thing that could possibly happen and work my way down to, like, DMs. But, like, I wake up and within a minute I'm right in the hustle of, like, catching up to everyone on the east coast to seeing what we need to do today, what we need to execute, how I need to spend the next hour and a half, like, before 7:00am I'm already at peak stress. And so I think for me, like, what I would love to do given the opportunity is like, be in like, a Hawaii, Bali type, like, out there, away from things with people I care about, whether it's family or friends, and just not be tied to this rat race and hustle is like, what I'm hopefully attaining to get. And then I say that and I know, like, how I'm wired. I'd say, like, I could probably do that for two to three weeks and I'd get bored and I'd want to do something else and build something again. But I at least love the luxury of experiencing that for a bit and then coming to the realization that I need to move off an island and come back to building something fun with other people.

I think, yeah. One of my favorite quotes I always keep referencing is I think Brendan Turner from Biggerpockets always says that the people that are able to retire early are never the ones that ever want to retire early. So if I had to guess, it sounds like you hustle significantly too much to ever enjoy hanging out on a beach for more than maybe a week or two, but I think a lot of us could probably fall into that category. So it was just an interesting question, I think, to figure out. Yeah, I think a lot of people want to be able to relax but kind of revert back into that. I got to be doing something a day.

Keep.

Keep the life interesting. Tyler, wonderful kind of questions here. And this is really cool to figure out kind of the growth and where you guys are at and where you guys are going to be. I'm assuming a lot of our followers might already be following you. If they are not, where can they.

Keep up with you?

Learn more about Beehive and, you know, stay up to date with the data.

So we're all pretty active on Twitter. Me specifically dank D E N K underscore tweets on Twitter is where I am a bunch. I'm actually not on Twitter that much. I give. I think I give the perception. I am. I go. I'm very tactical. I go in, tweet out an update, and then I'm off. I don't scroll Twitter often, but I do tweet a good bit. So Twitter very active on there. And then obviously the Beehive account spelled incorrectly. So B E E H I I V on Twitter. And, like, we feed all of our product updates there. We highlight content creators, we promote different people on the platform. So between following the official Beehive account and my personal account, you'll definitely be plugged into everything we're working on. You also probably get exposed to a lot of really cool content that's going on on our platform, and we definitely advocate and promote that as much as possible.

I love it.

Thanks again for coming on, Tyler.

Yeah, I appreciate it. It's fun.

It.