242 Tyler Denk on the Serendipity of Startup Success

Behind the Brilliance is a long form interview podcast for the intellectually curious and relentlessly ambitious. Each week I sit down with innovators, creatives and entrepreneurs to talk about the strategies, frameworks and experiences that have shaped their success. With more than 2 million downloads, the show has earned praise and press from Forbes Inc. Refinery 29 and a devoted listenership that spans the globe. I'm your host, Lisa Nicole Bell, a producer, writer and serial entrepreneur. If you're new to the show, you can find the archives, my newsletter and the show notes for every episode@bravendthebrilliance.com and now the show. Hey hey. Welcome back to behind the Brilliance. This is episode 242. My guest today is Tyler Dank, the founder and CEO of Beehive, an all in one product suite for newsletters powering some of the world's largest and and most notable newsletters. Tyler joined Morning Brew as the second employee leading product and engineering and helped them scale up until the acquisition by Business Insider in 2020. He then had a stint at Google as a product lead on the YouTube Music team before ultimately leaving to start Beehive in 2021 where he is currently the CEO. This is the ultimate conversation for the founders and hustlers among us. I will warn you that this episode is very long, but it's packed with gems, wisdom and insight that come from being in the trenches. Tyler was candid and opened up about a wide range of topics from working inside of a fast growing startup to processing failure to becoming a leader and much more. It's if you're a current or aspiring founder or just a professional contemplating the unpredictable path of building a career based on your aptitude and passion. You will love this episode and resonate with Tyler's stories and how he shifted his strategies to create one of today's hottest startups. This is one of my favorite conversations I've ever had with a founder because of how candid he was and that we get into a lot of the inside baseball of what it really means to start something from scratch. It's rarely pretty or neat and it doesn't fit a perfect narrative the way the glossy magazine stories do. So I'm excited for you to hear this. Please enjoy my conversation with Tyler Dank. Tyler, I am so excited to have you on the show. Welcome to behind the Brilliance.

I am excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Let's start with your early days. Tell me where you grew up and what your parents did for a living.

Yeah, so I was born in Baltimore, Maryland. My parents actually Both worked at Social Security, which is where they met. And then upon getting married, my mom actually stopped working to take care of me and then my brother. And so my dad continued to work at Social Security for I think about 50 years until retiring relatively recently. And also just had different side hobbies of detailing cars and other kind of like smaller business activities.

People from Baltimore have mixed feelings about the Wire, so I need know what your sentiment is before we go further.

I mean, I think it's one of the best shows of all time.

Oh, good.

I think it's tremendous. It's not like the greatest, I think portrayal of what makes the city and surrounding area amazing, but the show itself I think is phenomenal.

Okay, good, good. Just had to make sure you had good taste. No, I'm kidding. But same, of course. I read that you came from a family of entrepreneurs and um, so I would imagine that some of the entrepreneurial bug came from your, your dad and granddad, I think. But I also read that you described yourself as quote, hyper competitive and I want to understand where that started and what sustains it.

Yeah, I think you read correctly and I think you would describe me pretty correctly with that statement. My grandfather, after World War II started like a shoe store or started working for a shoe store and eventually bought and took over and had a few different locations in Baltimore. It actually just hit me a few years ago that he employs, I think two or three of my uncles. And so my entire kind of extended family worked at this shoe store and it supported, you know, all of those families. So that's something. Growing up, I would always go downtown into Baltimore and pick out different shoes, hang out with the uncles and my grandfather and just see them kind of run like a family owned business and scale that. And then my father is, like I said earlier, he started detailing cars on the side and is probably one of the hardest working people that I've ever met. He would wake up at 4:30am For I think maybe 30 of those 50 years, he worked at Social Security, maybe longer, but was constantly up at 4:30am getting to work around 5, 5:30. And then on his off days, whether it was Saturday and Sunday. And like later in his career, he actually worked longer days, Monday through Thursday and took Friday, which is like a great, I guess he was the real innovator of the four day work week. But he would typically do detail cars and sometimes two cars a day on his off days. So I think a lot of like the work ethic was being surrounded by both of them. But definitely watching My dad get up early every morning and like taking his off days as an opportunity to do more work, and he loved the work that he did was definitely something that I think influenced me. I mean, as far as like being hyper competitive, I think it's a little bit harder to pinpoint exactly where that comes from. But I've grown up playing sports my entire life, whether it's baseball, soccer, lacrosse, basketball is my real sport that I played primarily. And I mean, I just hate everything that has to do with losing and that's rubbed off in other areas of my life. I don't know if I technically have like a chip on my shoulder or what it is, but I take a lot of pride in being good at certain things and winning. And I think I hate losing more than I like winning. And so where, where exactly I came from, I don't know. But it's definitely something that I think is a pretty true representation of who I am and what motivates me.

Yes, yes, yes. I love that. When you were preparing to graduate high school, did you assume, was it assumed when you were in high school that you would go to college and if so, what were you thinking you would study?

Yeah, I think I always assumed that I would go to college. I didn't actually know what I was going to study ever, really. And I actually didn't even know what engineering was up until I think my junior or senior year of high school. I remember in high school everyone complaining that physics was such a difficult class to avoid it at all costs. I kind of viewed that as like an interesting challenge and I liked math and science and so I didn't really understand what physics was. Signed up and like, loved it. Got an A in my junior physics class. The professor was unbelievable. And then enrolled in AP physics my senior year with that same professor. And it was kind of like a feeding ground into like the University of Maryland engineering program. And that was the first time that I really understood what engineering was of like, solving different types of problems with equations. And I think physics leaves itself to engineering, like pretty one to one. And I just love having constraints and formulas and just figuring out how the world worked and that there was like different formulas and reasons for why things were the way they were. And it was just an interesting set of challenges. And so it was from that junior and senior year in high school of like really excelling at physics, loving the professor, he was unbelievable. And him kind of encouraging people to try engineering, specifically at the University of Maryland. That's what got me to initially sign up for electrical engineering at University of Maryland. I wasn't the best student. My freshman year. I actually bumped electrical and went to mechanical engineering. But yeah, that was kind of like my journey of like, finding my collegiate path and my major and what interests me in terms of, like, academia.

Sometimes people have a hard time connecting the dots between what they find academically interesting and what will lead to a sustainable career. Was there someone along the way who became an inspiration for you for what you would do with an engineering degree, or did you have ideas about how you would apply that while you were still in college?

Yeah, it was always a bit funny in the sense that a lot, I mean, University of Maryland is right by Washington D.C. and so a lot of mechanical engineers kind of funnel into like, big government contractors like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and do typical, I'd say, engineering work around those types of companies and problems. And like, I thought that was interesting, but not what really motivated or excited me. I grew up in high school and especially in college, kind of reading TechCrunch all the time. I was fascinated by startups. It was like, you know, early. I mean, not like early Facebook days, but like as Facebook and Twitter and these large tech companies like Uber and Airbnb were like, really growing. And just the startup stories of having this small team, camaraderie, building something special, the ups, the downs, just was like, very interesting to me. And I just love tech and like the advancement of products and efficiency and like, what technology could do to help augment people's lives. And so that was like what really interested me. And so there was kind of like a bifurcation of academia. I loved engineering. I loved going to the physics classes, like all of the advanced calculus classes, and just like be given problems and try to solve them. Like, that was fun for me in like the nerdiest way for engineering and school purposes, but professional. It was not exactly one to one. It was more of solving a larger problem set that can be applied in the business sense, which obviously lends itself to engineering or to entrepreneurship. And so I think it's like kind of the hybrid of wanting to solve problems, but wanting to do it in a way that helps other people and can be productized or monetized in the form of like a company and a startup is like, what pushed me on the path that I took.

And you got your entrepreneurial feet wet while you were still in college, right?

Yeah, I did a lot of things in college. I like, joined a lot of entrepreneurship classes early on and tried everything from the classic laundry service. Freshman year of trying to monetize, like picking up people's laundry, doing it for them and dropping it off. That was like a class project that I tried to like actually build up and didn't go very far. We also, funny enough, my senior year, I mean I didn't have a job throughout college. I took out student loans to go to college. And so I think I overspent my senior year and like ran out of money to pay rent with like five months of rent left. And so we actually ended up printing T shirts and selling them as part of like the senior bar crawl. And that paid my rent for the rest of the semester. So I've always had like different ways to try to find like get by and make money in some capacity. But like the big thing that we did was around sophomore year we had an idea for like a music application, kind of like a Twitter but for music discovery. And I mean me and all my friends were very into music. But the roadblock was we didn't know how to build the app. We had the idea. I did like the wireframes, I did like a YouTube kind of like video explaining it, but I couldn't code, my friends couldn't code. And that's what kind of hit us. Where? University of Maryland at the time, I don't know if they still do, had a top 20 entrepreneurship program and a top 20 computer science program. And the fact that there were thousands of students who had the technical skills to build this idea, but I didn't know them was like the problem set that we identified. And so we kind of pivoted it and was like, why can't we just build a platform that will help people like me and us who have these ideas typically like in the business school or in these entrepreneurship courses, connect with like the technical talent right across campus who can help them actually build it. So kind of find like a technical co founder. And so me and two friends started a company called venturestorm which did that. Funny enough, we also were all not technical. And so how we built it was actually teaching ourselves how to code. So we kind of solved our own problem the harder way by teaching ourselves a few different coding languages. We built the platform from scratch. So I'm a self taught software developer, don't do a ton now, but that's how I got into this entire space and really interesting experience. Like all of junior and senior year I kind of forewent going to the traditional route of career fair and internships. So I was pretty broke rather I spent all summers working on the startup, we would spend weekends instead of tailgating, we would sponsor university hackathons. So Harvard had a hackathon, Michigan had a hackathon, University of Toronto had a hackathon. And a hackathon is basically a weekend where software developers and students basically code all weekend to build a project or an app, which was our perfect target demographic of developers on our platform. So me and my two co founders would drive up the Boston to Harvard, we drove to Michigan, we drove to Toronto, we slept on like classroom or like auditorium floors because we didn't have like a hotel or any money and would sponsor these events and just network with software developers to help them sign up for the platform. And so that experience did a lot for me. I mean, it didn't become a billion dollar exit like I think we wanted it to be, but first and foremost it taught us how to code and build something from absolutely nothing, which was like an incredible experience and like a new skill set for me. It taught us how to be like incredibly scrappy. We identified our users as college developers and we figured out where they go, which is these hackathons. And then we made tremendous sacrifices of giving up fun a lot of weekends to drive sometimes 18 hours in a car just to sleep on like an auditorium floor, but to get in front of these users and talk to them and sign them up. And then we had like a few different grants at the university of like $500 a year, $1,000 a year, but like not a massive budget to market and grow. So just like very gritty. I would write long blog posts on Medium that would all plug our startup. We would answer questions on Quora that would plug our startup and like the most, you know, high effort, low reliance on capital methods of scaling this company. And yeah, I mean we grew it to, I mean we made money, we grew to several thousand users as an incredible experience. Didn't sell or go big. But like that experience in itself opened so many doors both from like a mentality and skill set and also from like a network perspective. Like when you're early days in this entrepreneurial journey, you end up connecting with so many different people who are on a similar journey and looking to help out. And so there's a lot of friends and colleagues that I met during that time in my life that have actually helped me and I still work with to this day in different facets of life. So that was kind of like my first like real entrepreneurial journey and it was pretty tremendous.

That's incredible. I think it's an important lesson to would be entrepreneurs to kind of take some of the stakes down on whatever it is they're trying to do. Most of the successful entrepreneurs I know have tried so many things, sometimes in a bunch of different industries, even before they have the thing that is the, the rocket ship. And there's a tendency to kind of tell these stories and leave out all of those failures or base hits before the home run. And I think it does a disservice to, to entrepreneurs because it creates this idea that you have to have a strike of lightning and then everything has to go perfectly and you get lucky and then you have this, this outsized outcome. So I really appreciate that you had this super scrappy experience because you learned so much in general, but especially like how to be resourceful. So when we think about the downturn in the market and what that has required of founder CEOs now, you're not like, oh my goodness, how am I supposed to make this happen on this little capital? Because you already have had that experience.

Yeah. And not to jump too far ahead to beehive, but our first 12 months we didn't spend a dollar on paid acquisition. I actually our first growth hire, our only growth hire to date comes from like a typical agency growth marketing, optimizing different ad campaign background. And we hired him because he is incredible. But the first thing I told him was we're going to grow this without paying for it. I think a lot of that came from that earlier experience of saying like, there's a lot of ways to grow a business, whether it's product led growth or content or just being scrappy. And I'd rather exhaust and experiment with all of those before we just pour money into acquisition. I think when you pour money into acquisition, it really obfuscates a lot of different metrics and traction. And like if you spend enough money, I'm sure you can get enough users to say that you're doing the right thing. But to be able to grow without paying for that growth, I think gives you a much tighter feedback loop of what's working, what's not working, and kind of teaches and like ingrains like frugality into the team and the culture of like what we are trying to grow here. And so I think that's probably a direct correlation from that experience in college.

Totally agree. The other thing is that you had, I guess they were co founders who were working with you and a lot of times people, people's only experience of collaboration in that regard is like a capstone project or a group project that they have to do. And I find that people generally are in two categories. Either they love them or they hate them because they're the person who'll stay up till 2am to get an A. And other people are fine with see, and it stresses them out. But if you're running a business at that age, you have to learn so many things. Negotiation, how to get people to cooperate with you, motivating people, especially at that age, because people want to hang out with their girlfriend or boyfriend or get drunk or go to the game and do all these other things. You know, you talked about the sacrifices that you made. So talk to me a little bit about how you kept everybody focused, how you identified people that shared your values to work so hard on your first venture.

Yeah, I've been very fortunate in both that venture and the current venture to have incredible co founders. I think finding the right person or people to partner with that you get along with and are equally as motivated and ambitious is really like a stimulant. And plus like early days, you're kind of like, you know, I'm only one person, but if I had another person, obviously just from pure output, but networks and compounding effort and every everything that you're working on, I think it really helps to accelerate traction and like just getting to market sooner. Back with venturestorm in college, they were actually twins, Taylor and Tommy Johnson. They are two of like the smartest people that I've ever met. Incredibly driven. That was a whole nother problem to navigate is like they were twin brothers as well. So they had their own kind of family dynamic of like arguing and fighting. So I was like kind of the outsider, not managing that, but we were just you know, in the trenches working, building this product while they have like their own family dynamic of being brothers and hyper competitive with each other. But they were incredibly driven and smart and were like really great partners for that and still great friends to this day. I would say like the advice that a lot of people give, especially professors in college, is that starting a company in college is so advantageous because typically you don't have a family, you don't need a full time job and you have all of these strings attached of like needing a job and you need to de risk your life to be able to afford rent and paying for other people and kids and everything else. And just the nature of a college campus. You have so many resources available to you from professors to legal help to scholarships and different types of funds that can help contribute to the business. And so while all of that's tremendous, there was definitely a bit of tension in the sense of hey, we're going to drive 18 hours to university of Michigan this weekend. Meanwhile, I have a few friends coming into town to tailgate and drink all day and they wanted to see me. And there was definitely a push and pull of here's our four years of college experience and fun and everything that comes with that. And then here's a business that's no guarantee of success, that we're making very real sacrifices and stress. And we were all three actually engineering majors. So there's a ton of coursework, there's a ton of social life and pressure to have fun and make the most of your time in college. And then there's wanting to prioritize the business that at the time we thought could be a multimillion dollar business and like a huge accelerant to our career and to our lives and juggling all of that while tremendous and we didn't have to pay rent more or less and like we had very little responsibilities outside of class. Definitely a lot of other struggles and things to kind of juggle being a collegiate entrepreneur, I'd say. But yeah, I mean it helps to go with, go through that process with other smart, ambitious people and was very fortunate to have two great co founders after that.

You landed at Morning Brew Eventually. Talk to me about what happened between Venture Storm and Morning Brew.

Yeah, so I actually stayed an extra semester in college. So I did because of my change major. They both graduated in four years, so they're the same age as me. They moved back home, started working on the company. I was juggling that in addition to my last semester of classes, I graduated in the December of 2016 and then moved back home as well. And I traditionally and historically been a very happy person. I'd say the closest I've ever come to like true like sadness and like depression would be that classic story of like building in your parents basement. I had no income at all throughout college. It was all student debt paying for classes and rent. And then I did not do any sort of paid internships in favor of working on the startup. And so I graduated college with like $120,000 of student debt. I had like less than $5 in my bank account to the extent where I think I have a screenshot on my phone. I think it showed 24 cents at one time where I couldn't go out with my friends on the weekend because I just couldn't pay for anything. And so I'd say between January of 2017 and me eventually joining Morning Brew, I was just in my parents basement tinkering around on this idea that was bringing in no revenue. And then I had the ticking clock of student debt having to be paid back I think six months after graduation. So June 2017 and I think around May is around the time where I just reached out to my two co founders and I was like, we're in slightly different situations. You guys are a bit more comfortable than I am and don't have student debt. And I can kind of tinker on this a bit longer. I have like real payments coming up in two months and like I really need to start like making some sort of revenue or income to like pay them. I'm also five months out of college, living in my parents basement, not super happy about that situation. And we just weren't really hitting stride with the company. So kind of an awkward, painful conversation. I stepped away. I think they continue to work on it for a bit longer. Like no real hard feelings, but definitely like a big turning point to kind of leave the company you helped start. Three years. Also just admitting that you're giving up on something that I did just pour my past three years of my life into was like fairly difficult. And then around that time period I started just freelancing while I was applying for full time jobs. So I was doing interviews and applying everywhere. I had the weirdest resume of all time because I didn't do any. I was like a mechanical engineering major which is attractive, but I didn't take any internships in mechanical engineering. But I like I was self taught at software, which is cool for tech companies, but I didn't have any engineering experience at like a software experience at a tech company. So I wasn't good enough at coding on paper, but I also had no experience in engineering and so interviewing was very weird for me. And so I just started doing while interviewing kind of like side projects on like Shopify. I was like huge into Shopify at the time and was just building like custom websites on Shopify for one, my grandfather's store. Any other people who reached out about potentially wanting to redo or like build a website for them, I would like tell them about how amazing Shopify was. I'll customize everything for them. I did it for my cousin as well. So kind of like odd, weird like freelance jobs. And at around the same time Austin Reiff, who is a co founder of Morning Brewing reached out to me. We were just kind of catching up. He was telling me about how the business was going, things were great and he had all these different ideas of things that they wanted to do that like the scam and Axios were doing, but they didn't have an engineer in house to do any of it. And he's like, what's your time look like? Like, do you want to help us out? And the first task was building like the social share sections at the bottom of each story where you can share the story to like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. And at the time the skim had that Axios had that morning, Brew didn't. And just in trying to grow, they're like, you know, reasoning if we could have more people easily share our content, we'll probably grow a little bit quicker. He asked me if I knew how to do it and I was like, honestly sure. I had no idea what I was doing whatsoever. No experience doing anything. But he offered I think $3,000 and I had I think under $5 in my bank account. And so it became a no matter what it takes, I will find a way to build what he's asking for. And those next three weeks, I probably almost wanted to quit 15 times when I was up at 2am tinkering on like this WordPress site that didn't work at all and I had no one to turn to. And like I came so close to texting him saying, hey, this was great, I really appreciate the opportunity, but I actually don't think I can build this. And I mean obviously I ended up figuring it out. They paid me $3,000. And he goes, now that that works, we have this like laundry list of 20 other things that would be amazing. Do you just want to keep working on contract while we, while you find a full time job? And like my intention was never to join them full time and neither was his. I don't think so. So we would, I would just build like I end up working like 20, 30, 40 up into like 50, 60 hours a week. Then he invited me to come up to New York for a happy hour and he was kind of talking like, hey, as soon as we can find like an engineer from Facebook or Google, it's going to be next level. And I kind of took that as like, I'm just like a temporary fix. Like I don't come from Facebook or Google. I'm self taught. I'm always kind of like doubting myself because I never had like the proper education around software development. And I kind of took that as like he's not looking to hire me. I also wasn't really booking to join Anyway, and we just kept building. I got an offer separately from Deloitte. I had a girlfriend at the time that lived in Washington dc. I had friends in Washington dc. It's like a pretty common move after graduating from Maryland and Deloitte. Very safe job, good salary, good 401k health insurance, I can start paying off student debt. It'd be right in Washington D.C. and so at that same time, Austin reached out and was like, hey, do you want to come up to New York and join us there? And I was like, pretty stumped of what to do in that situation. One was like a sure thing, like very reliable. The other was two guys sending emails from like an NYU dorm room in New York. And I, like, really didn't. I mean, I sat on this decision for I think like three weeks. And one of my good friends actually gave me one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten. But he said, you could be one of 40,000 people doing that exact job at Deloitte, or you could be the only person in the world doing what you're doing at Morning Brew and you should bet on yourself. And so that was by far the best advice I ever got. I ended up taking the job in New York. I gave my lease away in dc, left everything like very spontaneously, moved up to New York, got an apartment and just started showing up with this small three person team. And that's kind of like the full story of how I ended up at Morning Brew and the rest is history and by far the best decision I've made. But yeah, that's kind of how that happened.

Oh my goodness, that's an incredible story. That's a great story. I'm glad that you shared that. That is a great story. Because a lot of people don't bet on themselves in situations like that. And I always say it's better to try and fail than to live with the regret of wondering what would have happened if you tried. I mean, based on what I know of your journey thus far, it's been incredible and certainly more interesting than it would have been had you taken the safer path. And I think, you know, one of the advantages of being young and not having a ton of commitments and keeping a low personal burn rate is that you can do things like that.

Yeah, I would say the added pressure, which I already alluded to was like $120,000 of student debt that I just went from one sure thing, great starting salary at Deloitte, living in D.C. kind of close to home, to jumping into probably the most expensive Market outside of San Francisco and with a very unsure company very young. I had Austin walk me through worst case scenario. Morning Brew stops making money today. How long can you pay me for? And he ran all these models trying to explain how he would be able to, like, sell different things and like, be able to keep everything afloat. And so, yeah, the combination of, like the added expenses of living in New York and paying off a ton of student debt and an unproven startup was. I mean, I'm hoping a lot of people aren't in that situation or like, have less student debt to weigh on them because I feel like without the student debt, the decision probably would have been a lot easier with the cost and debt and everything else going on. Like, my mom was even like, are you sure, like, that's what you want to do? It's just like an email that goes out every morning and it's like two of your buddies that you know that are sending it. But like, what I learned in that summer as well was they gave me classic startup, they give you access to everything. So I was building the website, I was building the referral program, and I had access to the inbox of all of the replies to the email. And I think what pushed me over the edge was seeing every single morning they would get hundreds of replies from people saying, I look forward to this every single morning. I can't start my day without reading the newsletter. I like have told my classmates and friends and family all about the newsletter and seeing that type of traction and habit forming that was occurring with the product was like a huge factor in me having a bit more confidence of. I actually think they could really scale this up and make something of it.

Yeah, I mean, I know you've applied a lot of the things you've learned about the nuts and bolts of email and newsletters around deliverability and open rates and click through and all of those things. But it sounds like this was a massive learning opportunity for you. And it's one thing for you to learn some of those technical things to help them with the functionality of the newsletter, but for you to optimize for growth. I think, and maybe this is off seems like a different thing because growth gets into understanding the psychology of the reader and how to kind of manufacture some form of virality and things like that. So tell me how you educated yourself on that. Was it just like you got to see the data on each of the emails and so you began to test things and see what worked and then got better at it? Did you immerse yourself in it. Like, where did you turn to get great at that?

Yeah, I'd say you can kind of start to see the dots connecting. And, like, two things that I really love are solving big, like, ambitious problems. So going back to physics and engineering and then applying it to Morning Brew. The problem was we have a hundred thousand readers. How do we 10x that to a million by the end of the year? And that's just like a huge problem with actually not too many constraints, and there's a lot of green area there to explore and experiment. And then the other thing I haven't really hit on, but, like, I love psychology. I did AP Psych in high school. I did a few psychology classes in college. I've read a bunch of different books on psychology. And just understanding how people think, I've always found really fascinating. And so I think you see that in a lot of people who like working with growth is. I'm fairly opinionated and I have thoughts about. I think this will work because it makes a person feel like X and like being able to experiment in different growth strategies. But understanding who our reader is, who the target demographic is, and what would appeal to them is a really interesting set of problems. And again, with kind of like the engineering mindset, not having a specific solution in mind, but being open to experimentation was huge for us at Morning Brew. And so one of the first things we realized was the SCIM had a referral program that was working really well. We were getting all this inbound from our readers saying, hey, I keep sharing this with my friends and family and everything without us incentivizing them at all. And that was kind of the light bulb moment for the referral program, at least of our competitor in this space, who's a few years ahead of us, does a referral program. Our readers love this so much that they're sharing it organically with no incentives. What would it do to pour a little gasoline on the fire to give them an incentive of whether it's stickers or, like a community group or more content? And so that's what led to the referral program. I would say we weren't overly stubborn on what incentives to give. We asked our readers a lot, initially, kind of informally, via email. As the company matured, we do more advanced, like polls and surveys to understand what would actually move the needle. But yeah, there's like, the referral program aspect. There's like, common sense. Things like the social share stuff just made sense. If people like the story and you give them a very easy way to share it. More eyeballs will see that story, more people will see Morning Brew and that's like all growing the top of funnel to hopefully get more people to sign up. But the big thing we did at Morning Brew was we didn't really. And this is jumping ahead maybe a few years, but once we built out the different data models and understanding how to identify a quality acquisition source, we said yes to everything. We were so experimental. We had the New York City Wi Fi we sponsored. When you try to join Wi Fi in the subway, which I didn't know existed prior to this, there's like a little pop up ad that you have to click through. And we sponsored that it didn't work at all, but we at least had the data models and like the dashboards to know within two weeks whether it was going to work or whether it wasn't. And we told every single vendor, if you give us two weeks and it works, we will double down on spend. If it doesn't work, we're cutting it off. And so I think just being able to build into the company DNA, the ability to say yes to different experiments and initiatives that you that may or may not work and then also building in the systems to be able to identify as quickly as possible of whether you can double down or cut it off is great because you're not saying no to opportunities that you may later regret not pursuing. So that might be a little bit too analytical, but that's like a lot of the different like growth strategies that we deployed. And then like we. I was new to email, I knew nothing about email, I knew nothing about growing an email list or like the different tech in the ecosystem. And fortunately being in New York and Alex and Austin, the two co founders of Morning Brew, had an incredible network of different investors or advisors or friends in the media space. And so we met with people at different email service providers to understand how to improve deliverability. I connected with people at other like kind of newsletter companies understanding what they were prioritizing. We'd grab coffee with people from competing newsletters and kind of share notes. And I take demos with almost every email tool provider, not really to buy, but just to ask questions and kind of understand like how are they differentiating? And when they keep saying something like deliverability that is clearly important, what does that mean? How do you get better at it? And yeah, I mean I just fully immerse myself in surrounding myself with anyone who knew more about me in this space, which was everyone at the time and just kind of learning on the fly. Which is exactly what I wanted out of a job right out of college.

I love that it sounds like curiosity was one of the cornerstones of your success. Which is easier to do, I think, when you're coming out of college and you don't have any real world work experience. But in my opinion is something that's important to maintain no matter how old you are and how long you've been on the job. When you made the transition, I should call it, to product lead at Morning Brew, it sounds like you were responsible for the outcomes of people on the team other than yourself. And I would imagine you had some leadership experience from your time with venturestorm. But this was different. This was like a real job and these are people who are employed by this company and. And you're now having to, excuse me, teach them and make asks of them and give them feedback and all the different aspects of leadership that maybe you hadn't been trained on before that. I'm sure your interest in psychology helped, but talk to me about your transition from individual contributor to leader.

Yeah, and I'd say, like, I don't even. I didn't at the time know what product was. It was something that kind of like I stumbled into. And again, morningpeed was my first like real company experience. And we were at the time three people when I joined and scaled up to like when I left, I think we were like 35 or 40. But I was never in an internship or like a real company and organization of understanding different job functions. And typically they're fairly siloed of. Here's the engineering Org. They maybe talk to the product team or the marketing team every now and then, but they, you know, do their own scrum and engineering and stuff. And the marketing teams over here, sales teams over here. But like at Morning Brew we were so young, so early, so flat org and while I was the only engineer for the first 12, 16 months, like I wasn't pigeonholed to just building things and taking orders from the co founders. I was also doing like user feedback and also running our growth channels and analyzing how we were growing from the website and the referral program. So I was kind of doing my growth, but I was also doing software development and I also like understood the marketing and like the core objectives of the company. And so like it's the classic wearing multiple hats in a startup. But like my skill set isn't just heads down, coding all day. It's like understanding big picture. What are the growth metrics? How do we get there? What are the budgets and so I've come to learn that that's a lot of like what product management is. It's understanding my core KPIs. And what's the marketing team doing? What are users saying? What's the feedback from people using the product and how do we distill that to like actionable items for the engineering team to work on and improve? And I was kind of doing that all simultaneously in one function. And so product is what I accidentally fell into once I realized that that's what I was doing. And then the first hire I ever made was an engineer, Ben Hargett, who's actually my co founder now at Beehive. But for me, one again, I was in New York, like kind of spontaneously. I was 22, I think maybe 23. And then fast forward to 24. I was like leading an interview process, hiring engineers to join this team. I was running a $100,000 monthly acquisition budget on the growth side of the business. And it was just such a fun, cool opportunity where Austin and Alex trusted me entirely to kind of look at the business and be like, I think this is where I should spend my next two months building X. And they never really, I mean, they had input and they would say, I think that's a good idea. Have you considered this? But they ultimately trusted me to make those decisions. And so here I was as a 24 year old in New York running a hiring process, running $100,000 monthly budget, deciding like what we're building on our roadmap and kind of calling my own shots in a way. Like there was so much freedom and autonomy and they gave me a real opportunity to experiment and fail and try different things. And it led to me naively building a content management system instead of using a third party, which I think was the right move at the time. But I think now, looking back, I would never make that decision. But I was so naive and thought that that is what would solve our problems. And then yeah, hiring Ben and being responsible for other people was one at the age of 24, like a really cool opportunity. Like most of my friends were in entry level jobs with like eight layers of management ahead of them. Meanwhile, I was looking to hire my own team and help build faster. And yeah, our first hire was an engineer. We had hired a few more engineers, then we hired a growth person to come on as well. Jenny. And so yeah, I mean it's just like a totally different, like learning on the fly. Like I never read any management books, but I understood how I like to be treated and I love the autonomy that I was receiving. And that's how I've treated everyone from back at Morning Brew and then at Beehive today is my management style is not giving orders and making sure that people are doing XYZ every single day. It's giving people space and the opportunity to experiment and fail on their own and kind of make their own initiatives. And I think there's a certain type of person you need to find that excels in that environment. I've learned through a few hiring mistakes that isn't everyone. And some people actually really just whether they need it or they prefer it a little bit more direction. But what has worked especially for early stage startups in my experience are very ambitious people who take initiative and actually prefer autonomy. And if those are the people that I've prioritized hiring, that's kind of my management style of letting them do what they're best at and me being as hands off as possible, just guiding them in the right direction when needed.

Mm. Mm. That's brilliant. And I got to tell you, it takes some people 20 or 30 years to figure that out. I mean, I think, you know, you're unique in that you, your first real job was in a startup before a lot of people who have traditional work histories, they have these terrible bosses. I mean, we've, we've all had these terrible bosses where you're just like, how are you at your big age still so bad managing people? So it's so great that you had that clarity and you got that realization at such a young age. So before we dive into Beehive, I want to talk about your stint at YouTube Music. Uh, this seems random to me, but maybe it's not. Tell me how and why you left Morning brew and how YouTube music came into the picture.

Yeah, I mean, well, it is random. I'd start, I'd start with that.

Okay.

Yeah. I was at Morning Brew for three and a half years and we were starting to hit like a different stage of the company where it wasn't like super small, young camaraderie startup. But it's like, okay, we're actually making real money here, whether it's 15, 20 million a year or whatever it is. We should actually maybe have someone who's not like a 25 year old self taught developer running this team and running an engineering team and doing whatever, which like I totally get. And there was just like a bit of like a, okay, we're going to start hiring like very, not very senior, but more senior people who have been here Done that at different jobs and companies that have taken the media company, the engineering team from five people to 50 people, or have developed and seen many cycles of like the ad market and media and have more experience that I just personally didn't have. And so it wasn't necessarily me being pushed out by any means, but like, there was definitely someone coming on top of me to be my boss, which I wasn't opposed to, but because I'm always open to learning from other people. But I didn't really want to learn from a product manager from like Vice or Vox or the New York Times. Like, I was more interested in like kind of like tech and product, not like media per se. And so I kind of saw the writing on the wall there. And it also became like what was a wide open problem set of, hey, you can do anything. You can experiment with this channel or you can build this. We kind of built out the foundation of the tech ecosystem that we had at Morning Brew and it became more of like an optimization game. Let's optimize for the website to make it a little bit faster, add a few sections and like personally became just a little bit less fun, I would say. So there was that. And at the end of the day, like, what really interests me is like, if I'm going to build a product and like build this roadmap, I want thousands and hundreds of thousands of people using the software is, like, what interests me personally. A lot of what I was building at Morning Brew, which was an incredible experience, was building for like the internal team. So for the internal content team of 15 people to use and the internal sales team to leverage some of the tools that we use. And so while the consumer product was millions of readers, the email and the website are pretty hands off. Like, a lot of the tech that I had built was for our internal employee base, which is fun. And that gave me kind of like a de risked or a lesser risk environment to build software that if it broke, it only impacted employees. So it wasn't the end of the world. But just from like my career trajectory, what interests me is like big tech building software for the masses. And so around three and a half years, I kind of figured like that the writing was on the wall and the timing made sense to try something different. My roommate at the time worked at Google and found a job opportunity at YouTube. Music. I love music. I have like my big Desk Energy spot, Spotify playlist that has like 12,000 followers. I'm like always, I'm listening to music all day long. When I work and in the gym and I was like, oh, that's like very interesting. And from my perspective, I've seen company go from 3 people to 35 people. Incredible journey, super fun. I've never seen company, at 200,000 people operate as like one of the most profitable and largest tech companies in the world. And I was like, I wonder what experiences and learnings I could get from that. And then I was also kind of honing in on like product management, product lead, head of product, and being like, apparently Google is like this gold standard of product management and like what you learn in the processes are like very invaluable. And so truthfully, I always knew I was a startup person and that I wasn't going to love it, but I wanted to change. I wanted to see something like the complete opposite of what I was used to. And I wanted to actually like dive in and learn from others who are part of this massive behemoth of a successful tech company. And I kind of just wanted to refine like my skill set as a product manager. And so I ended up joining YouTube Music in I think October of 2020. So we were all remote. Pandemic was like a thing as of like eight months ago. And yeah, it was weird in the sense that we were totally remote. So I think a lot of the perks of working at a Google is like going into the office and like having like the lunches and the cafeteria and like the cool meeting rooms and like running into interesting smart people and networking. And I was just in my tiny apartment in Brooklyn in the winter in New York, just like kind of like trying to get used to this new team. Gets dark at 4:00'. Clock. I'm like, it's just like, it was a totally different environment. I ended up meeting really cool people there. My boss was amazing. Like we still are in contact today. The team was really smart, but almost immediately it became okay. This is very, very slow moving and there's not a million things to do and the things that I do want to do, I can't or I need like a bunch of approval and like, maybe we'll get budget for it next quarter. And so pace was very different. And then like to even take a step back before joining. So I stepped away in October of 2020. I had a one week off in between jobs and I'm just kind of like always on the move looking for something to do and to tinker with. And I was like, what can I do in this one week off while I'm like kind of Locked up in my apartment with COVID and, like, in the winter of New York. And that's when I actually reached out to Ben, being like, hey, I know we always talked about at Morning Brew wanting to build, like, kind of productize what Morning Brew was, because we always had inbound from people asking, how did you build the referral program? How did you create these emails? How does everything, like, fit into this ecosystem? And so we've always, like, talked about while at Morning Brew, what it would be like to productize it. It's a huge initiative and task. And it was like that week where I reached out to him, I was like, hey, I have nothing to do this week. I'm down to start tinkering around and play whiteboard some ideas. And he's like, let's get my friend Jake, who came in and joined Morning Brew as an engineer, on my way out. And Ben was like, jake's the smartest engineer I know. And I was like, well, you're the smartest engineer I know, so that sounds like a great fit, but try this out. And we had, like, a few meetings, like, virtually and just started kind of whiteboarding out what Beehive would be. And this is like, in that week transition before joining Google full time. And so at Google, I was, like, kind of lost, like, on, like, a new team, trying to, like, overachieve, but there wasn't, like, a ton of opportunities to overachieve. And I'd kind of, like, finish work at 1pm and ask my boss, what do I do now? And he'd be like, you're one of those guys.

You're supposed to be making TikToks. Tyler, I know this is.

Yeah, I think I missed that boat. I'm glad I did, actually. But I would kind of, like, finish work and be like, what do I do now? He's like, I don't know. I was like, all right, well, I'm just going to close this computer, open my personal computer. Key distinction there. Personal computer. Did not use Google technology for Beehive for legal purposes, but would like to start tinkering on that. And so the 10 months that I was at Google, I was kind of moonlighting Beehive on the side. And so what I would say is, like, the big takeaway from Google was I confirmed my belief that big bureaucratic company is not a perfect fit for me. And the pace of startup culture and lifestyle and everything is definitely what I prefer times a million. And then I would say I did take a lot of interesting tidbits from Google. My product processes of like how I thought about product, they went to like a not very rigid, but there's like a product requirement document that had these 10 sections and screenshots and wireframes and you map out exactly how things are supposed to look and work when you do xyz like at Morning Brew, I never did that. I just started building or like whiteboarding. I think this is how it'll work. But like I got into the habit of spinning up Google Docs and writing 1525 page documents that explain how something should work. Then they pass that to like a engineer who's owning that initiative to build like a technical scoping of like that's how it should work in like layman's terms. What's like the actual coding needed to build that. And so there's the engineering process and then like that ongoing relationship with like the product manager and the engineering team. That was something that one just never existed in my life prior to Google. And I saw firsthand how that was supposed to work. And that's like very much the exact process we do at Beehive. And so I did take away as like was my initial intention, like how do I get better at product managing and understanding how to launch really interesting products in an efficient manner? I did learn a lot at Google. It was just the work and lifestyle and culture, not for me. And that gave me an opportunity to kind of moonlight and spend weekends building my side project which became beehive.

Yeah, 10 months is not a long time. So it's good that you got in and got out because a lot of times people take those jobs and they think it's a pit stop, but it becomes like a five year, ten year thing because I think they say the two strongest addictions are heroin and a paycheck every two weeks. So especially a Google size paycheck.

You could also probably add in like stock options. Yeah, for sure. I mean I know in stock, I mean I, there's, I mean it's so true. But the people that I met there, there was a handful that had been there for four or five years who every week would say I can't wait to do that next week thing. But they're like, you know, next month I'm getting that next tranche of stock options and Google stocks, you know, it's 2020, 2021. Stock is skyrocketing. And they just had, they were the cognitive dissonance of wanting to leave because they didn't love the work but the financial incentive to stay. And I was Like, I don't ever want to be in that situation. Work is way too large of a portion of your life to not actually wake up and look forward to what you're doing. And the fact that you can sit there and say that you want to try and experiment with like DJing and starting this tech company or like doing a different product, but like, you are chained down with this like, stock option and like afraid to make a move. And then you just got married like a few months ago and now that you have dependents, it's just like this whole, I don't know, I didn't like the work enough to ever put myself in that situation. And I also don't really give a shit enough to say, technically 10 months is under a year and that looks bad on the resume. I don't really care what my resume looks like. I think if you have the right attitude and ambition and you want to build your own path, you can kind of explain your way through anything. And that's something I've always seen people like who aren't happy in a role say, like, oh, I want to stay 12 months, because that looks good on a resume. I think it actually looks worse the fact that you stayed somewhere that you were unhappy just to hit like a made up milestone over doing something and pursuing something you actually care about. But anyway, yeah, 10 months at Google, in and out, and launched the Beehive in the summer of 2021.

Wow. Yeah. No, I think everything that you just said is important, but I just want to tease out for a second what you said, alluding to risk and how people perceive risk. Because sometimes people will say things like, oh, you know, I would start a company, but it's so risky. Founding something is so risky. And every time I say, as opposed to what? Like eons ago, people got chased in the wilderness by lions and tigers and bears and that was risky. Like if you made the wrong move, you could become dinner. That was risky. Like the psychological quote unquote risk of failing is not really a risk. And I think there's too much emphasis put on, on that perceived risk. And to your point, you ultimately want to be around people who value the things that you value. And if you are a person who is willing to try things, if you're curious, if you have a bias toward taking action, then the people in a position to give you opportunities will see and appreciate that. So, yes, I really appreciate you sharing that.

Yeah. I'd also say two things really quick to double click on would be, one is like, I risked A decent amount I guess in like fun and opportunity costs and other things I could have been doing with venturestorm back in college and that failed. But like that, the lessons I learned, the network, the experience, the skill set, like everything about venturestorm is the exact reason why I am here today. So like me failing there and having $5 in my bank account five months after graduating, looking at $120,000 of student debt in my parents basement, like could have been a massive failure. And it was, but it opened so many other doors, which led to Morning Brew, which led to Google, which led to Beehive. And so like the risk of failure sucks but like it's not a binary thing. Like one failure typically just leads to additional opportunities in my experience. And so that's one example of that. And then two, I'd say like as far as like how I got to Beehive would be I de risked that situation probably as much as I could have. I moonlit and worked like I had. I kept my Google job and paycheck throughout the entire prototyping and building V1 of the product with my two co founders and they did the same thing. They had a full time job, they were paying the bills, they had, you know, steady income. What it required was the discipline to close your work laptop at 5, 6, 7 o' clock and the drive to work from 7 o' clock to 11 o' clock at night every single night and give up weekends. And so it's like a work ethic and drive thing. But we de risk the situation by not saying hey, let's quit our jobs tomorrow and then let's try to raise money or build this and like go no paycheck for a while. We actually built the prototype while having a full time job and then I actually raised money before ever quitting my job. And so I was like we I'm not going to self fund this, I don't have the money. There's like software vendors that we need to pay. And so with our initial pre seed round, as soon as I told our investors the second that the money hits the bank, I'll quit. And so we had money in the bank waiting for us to pay the salary of me and my two co founders day one. And so we never went without a paycheck, we took a pay cut for sure. And obviously then we entered the risk of what if we fail. But we never went months without a paycheck going all in on something. I think we did a pretty good job de risking the entire situation.

Talk about that. Because There are many investors who expect startup founders to be working on their startup full time in order to get funding. I think this is as ridiculous as what you just described. I think it demonstrates much more resourcefulness and strategy to figure out how to keep oneself afloat and to have income. I mean, not just be like burning through whatever savings somebody might have or severance from a job, but actually have income and also demonstrate, like you said, that commitment and drive to actually work on the startup. So I'm just curious about what their response was when you said this. Were there some who were like, oh, I'm out because you're not committed enough or whatever? Or was everybody just like, okay, cool, we trust you, let's do it?

Yeah. I mean, I kind of dislike a lot of things about like VC culture and like these different stereotypes and things that they expect different founders to go through. There's a lot of different people in different situations. And I would actually say the fact that I was able to mean a full time job at a big tech company, excel in that job for what it was worth, and also have the discipline to spend and find 25, 30 hours a week to work on this side project shows a lot more drive and work ethic than if I was naive and went all in and had no paycheck for that entire duration of building a startup in the early days and took the risk. I think that shows like a mismanagement of risk or work ethic. And so I'm not saying there's like a one size fits all, but I think a lot of it is like the story and the narrative that you tell. And I also think for seed investing in particular, it's betting on the founders and the team and their prior experience being able to build and accomplish things. And so, I mean, we had plenty of investors say no, most said no. But I think it's like a weeding process for founders as well to kind of find the right partners. Not once. And so social Leverage and Howard Lindsin are our lead investors for our pre seed and seed round and not once did they flag or push back on, like, hey, how come you're not doing this full time? Like, it was just assumed once if we came to an agreement and they funded us that I would quit as soon as possible. I think I told them, hey, I put our two weeks in and they weren't like, oh, can you, we just gave you, you know, $1.5 million. Can you make it like one week? It was like pretty understood, relaxed, like they trusted me, that I Mean, as much as investors are have a vested interest in the upside in the company going further and doing well, trust me, I have much more of a vested interest in this company is succeeding. It's my entire livelihood. It's what I'm pouring every hour of my day into. It's all of like my financial wealth is kind of sunk into the company and the potential of success of the company. And so that's something that I've always found kind of odd of like needing like a parent VC to tell you how you should be prioritizing things. I think is an indication you probably invested in the wrong company. I guarantee you I'm the most committed, an ambitious person and there's nothing that they could say or do that would impact how driven I am to make this successful. And I think there's like a lot of red flags if like your VC doesn't have that trust in you or maybe if rightfully so, maybe you're not the right person to start that company per se. But yeah, I don't, I don't love all of the broad. You have to like go eight months without a paycheck and like make, make your salary no more than 40k because you could be putting that money elsewhere. I'm much more of like a, you know, like we are people who are going to give our all at making this successful. I'd like to be comfortable and so I have like a nice place to work out of and I can enjoy a Saturday evening out with friends and not be stressed about cash because like ideally, and I mean we don't get paid much as founders, but at the same time like financial burdensome and stress shouldn't impact your ability to be able to focus on like the day to day. And I think if you introduce like how you're budgeting and you add more stress in an already incredibly stressful situation, it's just like a cocktail of like creating more drama for no reason where, you know, getting paid a fair salary so you can live comfortably and just focus on nothing but the company. I think it's pretty advantageous for everyone involved.

Yep, I, oh my goodness, couldn't have said it better. I've been preaching this from the mountaintops, even talking to founder friends who have confided in me that they are stressed about money and they're side hustling and doing all these other things and going to their board and begging for a raise of $10,000 a year. And I'm like, this is not helpful. Like this does not accelerate the company's. Growth, the path to IPO or an exit of some kind, therefore, it should not be happening. But it's surprisingly common. And I think I agree with you. It's a red flag because if you're the type of person who's going to be a good CEO, no one needs to tell you not to take a $600,000 salary the first year. Like, it just doesn't need to be said. You're going to be able to balance the amount of money, you know, you need to not be up at night thinking about bills with what's going to be best for the company and, and building out your team. So, yeah, I appreciate you sharing that because I completely agree and it's not discussed as often as it should. Let's talk about some of the objections that investors had. I'm sure there are things that you had thought about already. I'm wondering if anything novel surfaced during your pitches that made you think differently about the way you could become successful.

Yeah, I mean, fundraising's a whole thing in itself of interesting dynamic and very repetitive and annoying. And like, I like talking to people, I like building relationships. But the whole repeating yourself eight times for the same fun sinking like eight hours into like speaking to all partners just to get a no after syncing all that time and pulling data for them is like, definitely a total pain in the ass. But yeah, when we raised money in the summer of 2021, we, it was I think a few months after Twitter or maybe a year after Twitter had acquired Review, which was like another newsletter service and they were integrating it into the Twitter app. And then I think literally two or three months before we started fundraising, Facebook launched Bulletin, which was their attempt at building like a newsletter subscription service for like high profile authors and other writers on the platform. And so you had what is dozens if not hundreds of like pure email platforms like the Mailchimps and ActiveCampaigns and all of those type of traditional email enterprise software. You have like the new wave and Market leader and like Substack who just raised $65 million on the $650 million valuation. Maybe like a year or less when we went to raise. And then you have a few players in between. And so you have a ton of incumbents with massive market share. You have a clear market leader that's more like the new age newsletter media platform that we're building more similarly. And then you have big tech in Twitter and Facebook getting involved in the exact same space and product area that we are building in. And we have $0 and three co founders years behind everyone else. And so I can see the reasoning for why people did not want to bet on us. But that was like I think just like the saturation of the market, the competitiveness of the market. It also touches media and I think traditionally venture backed media companies from Buzzfeed and others have had their ups and downs and so being too constrained to like the media space and then it's super competitive and this and that and then I mean not a pure first time founder but like a first time founder raising venture capital and really doing this for full time in like the real world. I, I can see why people would have passed on us and those were some of the reasons. But yeah, our seed round took I think maybe like six weeks to close. I was actually in Los Angeles visiting for the month, just kind of doing that whole like workation thing that we were talking about. And my objective was like to close around. In my four weeks that I was in Los Angeles I connected with Howard Lindsay and he was actually down in San Diego. I didn't have a car. He said come down this weekend, we'll chat over at his partner's house. So I had to rent a car, drive down. I was like pretty pissed off if he wasn't going to invest because it was like a huge inconvenience and obviously he ended up investing. But yeah, that was like our pre seed round which was frustrating and annoying but like a good experience and like we ultimately got what we wanted and like around to be able to quit our jobs, pursue this full time, pay our salaries and make a few hires. I'd say our like next rounds like our seed round was May of 2022 so about 10 months later. And at that point we weren't de risked by any means. Like we were small, we were probably making I want to say maybe 30,000, $40,000 a month. But like I think the zero to $40,000 is like a pretty big jump in like finding some sort of product market fit this advice that I got from someone maybe a year ago or it was just like a one off comment but he was like, I was like hey, we're at like $30,000 a month. He goes it's a lot harder to go from 0 to 30 than it is to go from 30 to 300. And that's always kind of stuck with me of like the cold start, zero to one problems, like very difficult. It's the worst your product's ever going to be. It's you are the least proven. You're ever going to be. You have the smallest team. You're so scrappy. You are the newcomer in this space and you're still kind of finding your own processes and ideal target customer. And so when we were making about like 25, 30,000 in May and went out to raise money just so we could make a few additional hires, I was expecting to be like a two to three week, hey, look at the traction we have. Like great growth, everything's up and to the right plus 30% month over month revenue every single month. We have all these amazing writers and newsletters on the platform. And the feedback I got in that round was actually what pissed me off a lot more because maybe it was the expectation that we had done something and we weren't asking for a huge valuation, we just needed a little bit more capital and make more hires. But the feedback was like some collection of we like the team, we like the traction, we like the product, we like the revenue growth. We just don't know if you could pull off X which was like our next big thing, which is like the ad network. And that just really pissed me off from like the whole point of being a seed investor is like you, there are unknowns, like you have a ton of upside because everything is not de risk at that time. But for a company to be six months old and you love the team and the traction and the product and the revenue and everything else, but you're not sure about something that has yet to be built. One, just kind of shows that you don't trust me or believe in me, which is like ultimately who you're betting on in a seed investment. And two, it was like if that was already proven then we wouldn't be coming to you, we'd be raising a massive round or be wildly profitable. But you have an upsized return opportunity because you're betting while there is that unknown. And the question is, do you trust me as the person and my co founders and our team as a team to build that and make that a reality? That's the thing I would say about seed investing is it's less revenue driven and less metrics driven. It's do you believe in the team building it and me just having a chip on my shoulder, I think and being super competitive was every no in this seed round was kind of like not a we don't love the product or we don't love this. It's like we don't believe that you could do this and we don't think we can see a return because of your Inability to build xyz. And that always really pissed me off. And that's also why I have every investor. I send a monthly investor update every single month to investors, friends, family, every single investor that said no to us. I also have on that list because I want to remind them every single month that they made a mistake in not investing on us. And so maybe that's my pettiness coming through.

But I love it, though. I love it, though. How does the saying go? Chips on shoulders, Put chips in pockets.

Yep. So, yeah, that's. I mean, it does motivate me one way or another, knowing that at the end of the month, I'm about to type up an email that goes to, yes, our supporters and friends, but also everyone who said I couldn't do it. And having month after month of amazing numbers and growth and traction and more people moving over definitely fires me up to get excited to write that email and fires me up throughout the month to contribute and do more and keep pushing the boundaries. Knowing that email is coming and they're going to get an update at the end of the month.

Yes. Oh, my goodness, yes. I'm always like, it is my job to make the people who doubted me look crazy.

So, I mean, and also, like, tactically, it is great to, like, continue those relationships because, like, let's. I mean, my goal is to not raise additional capital, but if we did need to raise money, rather than having to kick up the conversation of, oh, here's what you missed the past 14 months. It's like you've actually got an email every single month. You know our revenue numbers, you know our traction, you know our pain points, you know what we've been able to build. So the conversation's like, it's not like a full pitch. It's. You've seen the progression of everything. And I think hopefully you would admit that you may have been wrong. But here's another opportunity to invest if we so need that. So there's like a tactical, strategic part to doing it. It's not just like me being petty, but there's definitely a decent amount of pettiness involved in, from my perspective of why I enjoy doing that and sending those emails.

Yes, I love it. Let's talk about positioning because, you know, I know that you obviously know a lot about growth and reducing opt outs and all of these smaller things, but from a standpoint of, I mean, and you, you talked about this earlier. There was so much competition in that space. There's ConvertKit, there's Mailchimp, there's like, I feel like the, the corporate people kind of have their ones they like. The non profit folks have the ones they like. Indie creators have the ones they like. And so, I mean, when you were, when you were preparing to launch Beehive, how did you think about go to market and positioning? Because you could have said, we're going to start out being exclusively for this particular demo. You could have tried to be much broader. I've seen a few launch where they're like, we're going to position ourselves based on our features, but that doesn't seem to work as well. And Beehive has this brilliantly strong brand and identity that evokes something in people. And I'm sure that's credit to your psychology love, but I would love to know what your thought process was when you were at the beginning of taking it to market.

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a few things there. One would be we aren't really building. Like, we aren't looking around at the competitors and saying, what are they doing so super well. Or how did Mailchimp get their $10 billion exit? It really was. I joined Morning Brew when we had 50,000 subscribers and had three people on this team making, I don't know, a decent amount, a very little amount of money in revenue each year. And then when I left Morning Brew, through the tech that we built, the different platforms, the integrations, the data models, we looked at our different growth tactics and how we approach scaling this newsletter both from a technology and a process standpoint. Like, I was as deep into the weeds of understanding the different levers and what data we looked at and everything in between, from the 50,000 emails to like, when I left that 3 million. And then you look at how many people have scaled a newsletter to 3 million subscribers and it's probably like a handful of people that have one even have a newsletter of that many subscribers. And then from my perspective of being there from not day one but very early and kind of building that roadmap of, hey, let's build a content management system that does XYZ and formats emails in this way. Let's do a referral program that helps, you know, incentivize readers to want to share. And here's the different tactics and like, here is how we're going to attribute data and subscribers and like, what actually matters versus what's vanity and actually not good for the newsletter. And like, we experimented with so many things going back to like, the experimentation stage of the company that I was talking about earlier. And there are so Many things we tried that didn't work. And there are things to try that did work. And just from the full ecosystem, like, I also wasn't pigeonholed to just the engineering. I was also doing the product and the growth. And so, like, when you take a step back, I just had a very interesting perspective of kind of building that roadmap. And I go, that's something that I don't think any of our competitors have. They might know how to build software and they can send emails and pull in some charts and data. But, like, I know how to get newsletters from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 1 million. And that requires a different skill set and experience that I just don't think is what is being prioritized by other competitors in the market. And so it was, how do we take the those insights and experiences and build that into a product where everyone can have access to those types of tools and insights to help scale their newsletter? And it's not a sure thing. You sign up and you have a million subscribers, but we give you the tools and the right data and the right dashboards and the right incentives to be able to scale your audience if you put the effort in and have like a strategy to go alongside of it. And so that was always our roadmap, which I found to be unique. And we're still like built what we wrote out in November of 2020. We're still like only 60% through, like what we had initially wanted to build. And we haven't really deviated all that much. There's been small deviations here and there and our competitors have done things or they have done things that we have launched. We have looked at some other things in the competitive landscape to remain competitive and adopted. But for more or less, we've kind of stayed true to our initial roadmap. And so that's one way in terms of like, how we are building and differentiating yourself. And like, we definitely, and I personally lean into the Morning Brew story because it is unique and it is something that I don't think the competitors or, you know, Morning Brew is a leading newsletter in this space. And so to say that you are using tools built by the same team that built Morning Brews tools, and they know the ins and outs of like, what made Morning Brew tick, I think is like a pretty strong competitive advantage that we're laser focused on that. And then to that note, how we got our first users and kind of built this brand was what we realized is when we, and in particular me, in assessing different Email platforms. While at Morning Brew we'd kind of look at what were the competitors that were quote unquote ahead of us using. And whether it was like the Skim or Axios who had teams like two or three times the size of ours, we'd kind of be like, oh, they're both using Sail through. That means there must be something there. So because our competitors who are bigger than us and a little bit more established are using those tools, maybe we should use them. And so there's like a big like follow the leader type mentality. And I think most industries, but definitely with like newsletters and like the software vendors that they use. And then I've heard that same thing from countless other newsletters who use the same tech stack as Morning Brew because that's what Morning Brew uses. And so in identifying that whole like follow whoever you look up to mentality, we got our first users. One our pre seed round was all strategic and or not all strategic, but primarily strategic investors of people who had a large audience, ideally had a newsletter, were large on Twitter or YouTube, but basically had an audience of some sort and ideally had a large reputable newsletter. And so like an example of that is like Liquidity. The meme account on Twitter and Instagram he had at the time like 110,000 person email list called Execsum. He invested in us and that's part of being an investor and wanting to support us. He moved over very early and so now every One of his 110,000 readers saw a better looking template, referral program, other features that we had launched and it all has like that call to action of Powered by Beehive. And so people pay attention to them, they go, that's interesting. Liquidity just moved his newsletter to Beehive. Let's check it out. And it started to compound by first leveraging our investors because they were financially incentivized to help us, which is an incredible growth hack and tactic just to get your investors and strategic investors to be early adopters and users and then it just starts to compound from there. So they were very patient with us because they were incentivized to be. And as they were patient, that gave us the time to build out the product, make it more competitive and then start taking more, I'd say like market leaders in different industries to move over to our platform. We're incredibly underpriced. And so that also bought us a decent amount of wiggle room of like, hey, we know we don't have every bell and whistle yet. It's Very much on our roadmap. We need a few months. So we're a young team, we're five months old. But like, we're also going to save you 80% of your monthly cost. And I guarantee you what you want is exactly what we're building. We just need a little bit of time. And that was the pitch for the first eight to 12 months. Still kind of is like it. It is like I said, like we're 60% through our initial roadmap. And that was always the stress and tension. Early days of the startup is, hey, you're complaining because you can't do X. I know X is being built in four months and waking up with that stress of can we keep this person happy enough where they don't churn? Because what they want we don't offer. But it's coming is like the constant stress and push and pull of, hey guys, we need to launch this a lot faster. But, you know, you're also balancing burnout and everything. So I think what I just said is pretty relatable to any early stage software founder. There's. You are the least advanced you'll ever be at the beginning and in a competitive space where there are alternatives, people want what other platforms offer and you just aren't there yet by nature of time and being in your infancy of the company. But yeah, that's kind of like how we kind of like clawed our way first through strategic investors and then underpricing the product and then just selling the morning brew narrative to keep getting larger and larger users to move over. And then the whole follow the leader effect kind of kicks in. Of, oh, these 15 newsletters that I all read were using platform X and are now using Beehive. I should check it out for my company newsletter. And it kind of like snowballs and compounds like that.

As somebody who sees content from the newsletter perspective, what are your thoughts on the recent shifts in the creator economy and where it's headed?

Yeah, it's interesting because I think the classic case study that everyone quotes is Facebook. When they convinced all of the big brands and creators to create pages and then pay a ton of money to boost your pages and grow likes because more likes meant more impressions. And so if you're Kellogg's cereal and you invested millions of dollars into growing your Facebook page, every time you post something about a new cereal or ad or whatever to your page, it's seen by millions of people. And then Facebook makes a strategic decision to change their algorithms where that's no longer the case and they're prioritizing friends and family and groups. And now Kellogg's just kind of got burned and their distribution goes from whatever millions it was to like maybe a fraction of that. And so that is kind of like that same narrative can be applied to like let's say Instagram more recently, you know, primarily a photo sharing app. TikTok's extremely popular. They make some adjustments to their algorithm and they mention strategically that they're going to focus on short form video. And then all the content creators who rely primarily on photos are now kind of getting burned by this change in algorithm. And so it is always like in investing and building an audience on any platform, you are at the mercy of the algorithms and decisions of the leaders and engineers, engineers at that company. And what email has become is a hedge against needing to rely on those algorithms. Rather, once you have someone's email, you have a direct line of communication to that person. Email is incredibly sticky. People have said it's going to die indefinitely, but everyone uses it for work. It's something that you keep coming back to. It's a very reliable form of communication and it's also very not distributed, distracted medium where Instagram and websites and TikTok and everything, there's just so much stimulus and it's so quick and like fidgety. Where email typically, whether you're getting caught up on work emails or you're starting your day or wherever you take the time to carve out to read your emails, it's like a very isolated environment and it's very direct and one to one. And so that's obviously the trend that we rode at Morning Brew. It's what the hustle and access, Axios and Politico and all these other different companies have leverage and taking advantage of their newsletters. I don't think for a lot of these content creators and companies that it's like necessarily the end all be all needs to be the primary channel. But I think it would be a mistake not to augment your audience communication if you're big on YouTube to also have a newsletter that creates this cycle of sending newsletter subscribers to your most recent videos, sending video subscribers to your newsletter and you have kind of like tangential content. So from the creator perspective, it's slightly more work. I think those who do it best don't just regurgitate the same content in two different mediums. Rather there's like a slightly different angle taken to it. But yeah, I think there's like a slight diversification away from like the big tech algorithms and then there's also just like the benefit of what you can make, whether it's a direct subscription or via advertisements, to get in front of X people in an isolated environment in their inbox. And they can click through very easily without going to the profile link and everything else. So that is kind of, I think, the bull case for email. The slight caveat is like, it's not totally algorithm free and like, not to nerd out on deliverability, but like spam folders and promotions and everything that I'd say like 99% of people don't really understand how it works. Like, there is an algorithm somewhere between spam filters and Gmail and elsewhere, but it's much less pronounced in terms of like an algorithm decision made by a few engineers at a big tech company that can cut your distribution and impressions in half overnight, hypothetically.

Oh, I love that. That was very well said. And as somebody who's been in and around the space for a long time, I very early on started optimizing for building an email list. And people would be like, you need more followers on Instagram. You should build your following. You should do this and this and this and over and over again. It was what you said. I mean, I am old enough to remember my space and, you know, I had glitter on mine and music on mine and all the things. And then it went away. I was just like, oh, this is how social media works. And so you cannot get too attached to any profile. You can only be attached to things that you own. And your list is really all you have at the end of the day. And so it's been so interesting to see there slowly be a shift to that. What is your advice to somebody who's listening to this, who's like, I want to say start a newsletter because I'm trying to build a personal brand or build myself as a creator or even launch a small business. And they go to Beehive, they're about to get started and they're trying to figure out how to get just like that first 1001000 folks and get into a rhythm around delivering content on a consistent basis. What do you suggest?

Yeah, I think like step one is just understanding what the end goal is or like what your actual intention is. So. And I should take my own advice. I've been wanting to start an email list, I guess through Beehive. I do write like the weekly updates that go to 40, 50,000 people right now. So that is a channel to contact this audience. But it's like not my personal branded list. Per se. But one is like, do you want to build a business around this? Like, is it to build the next Morning brew or to scale this up, put ads in it, make a lot of money, make it a side hustle and then maybe like a full time gig? Is it just a way to communicate with like minded people in your community, friends and family, stay top of mind or just like, maybe you love writing and you just want an outlet to write about things that you care about. But I think kind of starting with what is your end goal is important because there's like different stresses and pressures and strategies that you'd want to pursue depending on what it is, whether it's a hobby or an actual business. But first is like really understanding that and then finding your voice and understanding like what is the content that appeals to people that is working towards whatever that goal is. So if you're writing for yourself, it's a lot easier. It's whatever you're interested in. If you're trying to be the morning brew of real estate, hypothetically, then you have to kind of back into like, who is my ideal reader? What type of content are they missing in the market? What is the value? What is the value that I can provide this audience that would incentivize them to subscribe and constantly read? And so like going back to the Morning Brew example, it was business news is dry and boring. We will make it conversational and witty and fun and hit you with like five to 10 stories in a very concise, quick format and you know everything that's going on in the world of business and a five minute read to start your day. And so like the value prop was very clear. We knew who we were targeting. People that weren't subscribed to the New York Times or like reading like the Wall Street Journal front, back, but were probably commuting to their job in New York City or getting their day started wherever, and had 10 minutes to carve out and read a newsletter to get up to date on business. And they were probably, you know, upward trajectory career, just trying to advance themselves, curious, wanted to learn more and so understanding like who that reader is. You can then back into like, where are those people and how am I going to grow this list? By finding and getting in front of them. But it really starts with like, what's your goal? And then what's the value you're going to provide the reader? You can't like growth hack your way into forcing people to read something that they don't want to read, or there's no real value in it for them to take the time out of their day to read it. If anything, with the attention economy, between TikTok and work and TV shows and movies and other emails, like, there's so many things vying for people's attention you really do have to nail down. Like when people sit down and read your email for five to 10 minutes, they're actually getting value out of this and you're enhancing their day or their profession. And that's like, what I think all of your time should be spent in initially and, like, probably for a while. The second that you kind of lose sight of what makes your newsletter unique and what's the value you're providing and focus more on growth tactics and acquisition costs and this and that, I think a lot of people kind of lose focus of kind of that gritty way of growing initially, which is just providing great content.

Yep. And I think. And you, you tell me what you think that the, the open rate is probably the best signal of that. Right. I mean, to some degree, it's also like what you were talking about with Morning View, Morning Brew. Are people sharing this without being asked to? But otherwise, it's like when your name pops up in someone's inbox, do they open it because of what you said? They trust that the content's going to be great on a consistent basis. What's the open rate that somebody should be aiming for? Like, what's excellent, what's good, what is poor?

Yeah, I mean, with caveating, almost everything with it depends in terms of, like, list size and content category and everything else. Like, a friend who just started an email list of, like, close friends and investors and colleagues has like 600 people on her list and it's like 70%, which is like, very high. But that's also because by nature of her list, it's like close colleagues and friends. Morning Brewer was like a leading in the industry for how big we were, and we were probably in like, the low to mid-40s. This was also before, like, the Apple privacy changes. So my guess is now, like, Those low to mid-40s would be reflected with, like, open rate inflation, if you will, and like, probably the high 50s. But yeah, I mean, traditionally, I'd say like, anything over 30% would be, like, good. Anything over like, 40 to 50%, meaning, like, half the people you're sending this to are opening your email is like, exceptional. Beyond that, I mean, it's just like you either have the most engaged audience ever or like a smaller list or whatever it may be. But like I'd say above 30 is very good, above 45, 50 is like exceptional. And then anything like kind of like sub 15, you probably need to either rethink your content, clean your list. But yeah, those are like rough ranges, but one again, obviously it depends on like list size and content category and who your audience is and what the function is, whether it's a paid newsletter. I mean, if people are paying for your content, they're probably much more likely to open because it's like the sunk cost of paying for something and then with privacy changes and everything else, like open rates do get obfuscated a bit. It's not the cleanest metric anymore and it'll probably continue to trend that way, which is frustrating because there aren't too many signals in email. There's open rate, there's click through rate, there's referrals, there's unsubscribe rate and there's replies. And if you're going to take what I thought was the most indicative of engagement, which is open rate, and obfuscate it so it's less straightforward. It's. I mean this is like the bear case for email is like, it's not super data intensive and of the data points you do get, they're not 100% accurate due to a bunch of different reasons. So yeah, I think that answers your question with like approximate ranges. But there's plenty of caveats and carve outs there. Helpful.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think that does provide like a starting point for folks to know when it's time to tweet content and when it's time to turn on referrals because the content is solid and folks want it. Switching gears a little bit as we wrap up on Beehive to the company aspect of it, because in the early days it's just you and your co founders kind of building and hustling, but after you raise your seed now there's an expectation that you hire folks. And as you know, any good founder or CEO has three jobs. One is to set and chart the vision for the company. The other is to make sure you don't run out of money. And the third is to hire and retain great people. So I would love to hear about your journey of, of hiring people. I mean, we talked earlier about your management style, but you know, now that it's your company, it's a little bit different when there's certain people that you want to hire or go after who you think could move the needle.

Yeah. And hiring early stage startups Always very interesting because again, like you are the least polished, least known and most unsure thing you'll ever be in the early stages. So it does take a certain type of person to want to join a company that is very unproven and very much in its infancy. We got lucky. As we were building out our initial prototype, all working full time, we ran. He actually was my advisor at a technical advisor. One day at Morning Brew, Austin walked in and was like, hey, you're a self taught 24. No offense, but like you probably don't know everything about engineering you. And we're now making like real money. You should probably have someone that you can lean on as a resource to help you out. And so he introduced me to a friend of one of our investors at Morning Brew, Andrew Plackin, who was like the most brilliant person I had ever met in my entire life and like genuinely mean that statement he could. Whenever I messed up at Morning Brew, which was a decent amount, I was like, I would call him and be like, hey, something's not, something's acting up. I have no idea what I did. I'm panicking because I'm in charge of the engineering team at Morning Brew. Meanwhile, again, I'm 24, self taught, kind of no idea what I'm doing, like fully learning on the fly. And Andrew would be able to like while at his job, just like shift gears and solve whatever problem I had messed up in the matter of like five minutes. And like saved my ass way too many times at Morning Brew. And so when we were building Beehive initially while we were working our full time jobs, we actually, I reached out to Andrew and was like, hey, I haven't, we haven't chatted in a while. I have no idea what you're up to, but like we're building this. I think there's like a huge opportunity here. Just kind of curious what you're up to, your thoughts if you wanted to get involved. And he was like, actually I'm hiring or I'm interviewing for a CTO job at this other company. But like happy to stay in touch. And then he reached out like a month later and was like, actually that job fell through. If you guys are still looking for some help, like one, I'll be straightforward. Like I definitely want to be a cto. Like that's the next step in my career. But I'd love to help you guys out just for free. You don't have to pay me. I know you don't have any money, you haven't raised money. Yet, but would love to just poke around and see if it's a good fit. And so kind of a sticky situation where like my pitch to Ben and Jake as co founders was like, look, you guys are the boss. Like we're going to do this thing. And they're a little bit younger than me as well, so they were I think 24 at the time, maybe 25. And my pitch was, hey, it's a little risky, but like, I have a ton of conviction that this is going to work. We can raise money and like, you are your own boss, you're a co founder, you don't have to report to anyone. And before we even went full time, I presented to, hey, do you guys want this CTO that technically you're kind of reporting to, but not really like you're a co founder, but he just has an additional 10 years of experience and is brilliant. And they were very hesitant at first and then Andrew worked with us for free for three months and Pro proved to us that he really was like the most brilliant person. And it became a pretty unanimous decision to bring him on as like the first hire, kind of like a quasi co founder. So when we went full time, he joined shortly thereafter and became cto. So the founding team more or less was me, my two co founders and then Andrew Plack and join as cto. And so it was us four. And just like early days, there wasn't much of a product or like customers yet. We were very much in heads down and build. So good team, all engineers building and coding. We then brought on someone to help do everything else. We had four engineers and like there's a lot of other aspects of the business from growth and support and operations. So we brought them in operations and community manager and then a growth person. And so those were like the initial few hires. Then we, I mean, we're very engineering heavy and so that was kind of like how we got up and off the ground. But yeah, the management style applies just the same as what I mentioned earlier. Like, we want people who, we give them enough context to really dive in and understand here's what users are saying about us, here's what's working well, here's what's not working well. You're a smart person. We hired you for a reason. What would you do in your job function to make this better? And everyone kind of swims in the right direction and there is a ton of autonomy. And so, yeah, I mean, it's very similar to the days at Morning Brew in terms of how our team is run. We're also I think 15 right now. So very small, very flat org. Everyone knows their function. Everyone's just heads down building and trying to turn this company into as big of a success as possible. But I would say like, as a founder, one of the most gratifying things that have happened to date is having one of our employees who we hired as I think maybe like the third or fourth engineer and joined in February of last year. This post randomly in Slack, like, hey, when I joined we were only making $4,000 a month and now we're doing $55,000 a month. Like that's so crazy to me. I'm so happy to be here. And like it's that type of like ownership that someone like feels that he, which he very much was a part of this process and journey, that he had a direct impact on us going from 4,000 to like 50,000. It's kind of like I think the upside of joining a startup early and having and giving your employees the ownership and autonomy to really make it their own. And that's been really fun to watch.

A few rapid fire questions for you before we wrap up. The first is about your perspective on failure and rejection. We talked about this a little bit earlier when we spoke about risk and opportunity cost and things like that. But in order for you to have gotten to this point in your career and in your life in general, you have to have a particular perspective on the possibility of being rejected and the possibility of failure. Tell me what that perspective is today.

Yeah, I mean it's part of the drive and motivation to not experience it. Right. Like I think once you make the leap and make yourself vulnerable into a situation where you are exposed to failure and odds are that you will fail, you have to be somewhat comfortable with that. And then it's that added motivation to want to do everything in your power to avoid failing. And so maybe it is a, there's like different levels of failure. Like there's the fear of failing for the sake of like no one wants to fail. And so like I'm doing everything I can to ensure that we are successful. But like that's already past the leap of faith of like, I am now in a position to fail. I don't know if that makes sense, makes perfect sense. But yeah, it is fully accepted. It's the thought of something going horribly wrong and me mismanaging the team or the funds or the company or not jumping onto a trend that we need to take advantage of or launching XYZ and everything that I have poured my life into for the past 16 months. Plus, going to nothing is like the worst possible outcome. The silver lining is like what I could say about Morning Brew or venturestorm in the sense that that was also the worst possible outcome when I was 18 years old working on that. And it did happen and it opened so many doors and got me to where I am now. So there is always a way to fall forward in that situation. But yeah, I mean I am fully exposed and open to the possibility that this can fail and odds are in startups that most do. But it is what drives me to get up every morning as early as I do and work as late as I do to make sure the team's in the best position to never experience that. And I'd also say the calculation changes a bit when you have employees because it's not like my personal financial situation and failure and like my Life, but it's 15 other people whose paychecks and family depend on us and they took that leap of faith to join me and my co founders on this journey based on the vision that we sold them. And that weighs on me pretty heavily as well. So it's not like a me solo entrepreneur thing. And what would my friends and family and colleagues think if this doesn't work out? It's I convinced several other smart people with unlimited options why they should come to us. And like that's a huge responsibility that I don't take for granted.

Very noble. What are the habits that you feel fuel your success? What are your best habits?

I am to a fault very routine oriented and my roommate makes fun of me a ton of but I feel like knowing that you have a finite amount of time in your day. I have a very like regimented schedule in terms of what I do every day and what I eat just because I need as many hours of the day focused on the business as possible for like where we are. And like it may not be the healthiest lifestyle per se, but I wake up at 5:30 every morning. I like have small like great habits in the sense of like I don't check my phone anymore. When I wake up I meditate for like 20 minutes. When I get up in the morning, I go to the gym for an hour every morning, come back. So that's like my morning routine but from like 8am till 10pm ish. I'm pretty locked in Monday through Friday at my desk working and then I try to wind down. I'm currently learning Spanish and I try to read for like 30, 40 minutes before going to bed every night and try to still get like seven plus hours, so very regimented, which like I need to feel productive and accomplish and do everything that we need to do with the company. So it's kind of like by nature forced me to be to create these very strong habits where I can get good sleep, where I can exercise, stay healthy, be mentally in the right place and put myself in a position where I can give 110% for very long hours per day.

Oh, that's incredible. Your investors should be very proud because there's this weird hustle culture thing where people think mainlining energy drinks and being up till 3am and working seven days a week is the way, but it's, you know, building a company is a marathon, not a sprint. And maybe people who've never experienced burnout don't understand how serious it is, but my position has always been it's better to prevent burnout than to recover from it. So well done. What have you changed your mind about recently?

If anything, it may contradict some of what I answered in the last question, but okay, I have been on this like 16 month grind of like 5:30am Wake ups, working 14, 15 hours a day. And while one of my superpowers, I'd say is I don't really get burnt out or I felt it very rarely. And I want to milk that for as long as I have the ability to have that drive and work without being burnt out. I think a lot of that just is the general excitement of the business and the traction and success we've had is very much addicting. And I have so many goals and ambitions for where this company could go and what doors it can open for not just me, but our employees. That, that is like a lot of the fuel that drives me. That being said, like, the amount of hours and time and stress that it causes me is probably not the healthiest. And so to contradict some of my last question, like recently started, I've been wanting to go to therapy for a while. When your life is staring at your computer for 16 hours a day alone in your room in a remote work setting. And then, I mean, I mentioned earlier Andrew Plack and he actually passed away tragically last year, May, which like took a massive toll on me and the business. And so like, I've fortunately never really been through anything traumatic in my life. That was probably the first and the worst. And at that same time that he passed away, went through unexpected bad breakup. I'm trying to raise money for this company, but getting rejected left and right for two months on end. And all the while I'm sitting at my desk alone for 16 hours a day. That was the closest I've ever been to, like, genuinely feeling sad for months. And so with that, I, like, made the decision that I definitely wanted to start going to therapy. And like, through that experience, I've realized and just like, picked out opportunities in my life where, yes, the business is probably by far the most important thing to me, but there's more to life. And just being able to appreciate that and not get so caught up on the highs and the lows of the business and trying to find a little bit more balance is something that I think I've technically changed my mind on before. I would say it's all go all the time. And nothing is more important than making this a success. Because if it is a success, I can look back in 10 years and hopefully have more opportunities and be happy. But there's a lot of opportunities and experiences along the way. And I don't want to look up at the end of the journey and be happy. I kind of want to enjoy more of it during the journey. And so that is one of the more recent changes in mind, I'd say.

Oh my goodness, that's genius. That's excellent. Yes, because it's sad, but sometimes it takes death, a health diagnosis, a car accident, bankruptcy, like these dramatic things for us to realize how short life is and that youth does not absolve us from being impacted by that. Like, people die young every day, and even if we are young, the people around us will pass away. Like, it's very important to keep that in perspective while we're building. So that's excellent. So I have two questions for you before we wrap. The first is about books. These can be new or old, fiction or non, books you personally love or books you think everybody should read. What you got?

Yes. So one of my favorites is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel.

Yes.

Like going back to like psychology and just how humans, I mean, unless you're in like an animal business, I feel like most people are dealing with other humans, whether it's employees, customers, users, whatever. So like, again, psychology, I think is just so important to understand and understanding the different fallacies and just logic and everything associated with how people make decisions, I think is such a powerful framework and something that people should really take advantage of learning. And so that has always been like one of my favorite books. Maybe not like all time best book, but kind of like a recency bias of just finishing it relatively recently. Would Be the book about the Bonobos founder, Burn Rate. So he was dying.

Oh yes.

Yeah. So what is his name? Andy Dunn. So Bonobos, actually I used to wear a ton of their clothes in high school and college. But the book, it's kind of like an autobiography. But he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and then ran his company and had all of the ups and downs of starting a company and scaling it through like a large acquisition to Walmart, but also had more exaggerated ups and downs. Obviously being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and it was just like a really. It was at. I kind of read it during the time when I was going through a bunch of things and just the ups and downs of the business and how that weighs on you and just trying to imagine also having a mental disorder that you are dealing with and hiding from others and like putting on a front to be able to scale a company and act, quote unquote normal to investors. I thought that book was like really, really tremendous and really enjoyed reading that. So I don't know if it's an all timer for me, but for lack of a better answer, I'd say thinking fast and slow. And Burn Rate I thought was like really great.

Ah, I like those choices. The last question is, what is behind your brilliance? What do you attribute your success and creativity to?

Probably, I mean, I think so many things in your life and how your brain is wired is due to very early experiences in your life. So my parents were always great at signing me up for different activities and encouraging me to try things. So when I was young I did everything from obviously I said I played every sport, baseball, soccer, lacrosse, basketball. My parents signed me up for gymnastics. I did art lessons when I was little. I used to get bullied by a class of six other girls because it was really six girls and me and this art lesson that I'd go to every week and they would all gang up and make fun of me. But being able to just express myself with art and experiment with like a creative side, that was interesting. Gymnastics, I guess, like isn't like a stereotypical activity for every guy who's also really interested in basketball and lacrosse and wrestling and all these other sports. But my parents were like always looking for different activities for me to participate in and try. And it really opened my aperture towards like what was possible, what experiences I can collect, what skill sets I could develop. And so I think being exposed to so much and being surrounded by people who loved me and wanted me to try things and didn't really dictate what I did, but supported me in whatever I attempted, was like a very nourishing environment and helped lead to, I guess, like a lot of my work ethic and risk taking and experiences since.

Oh, I love that. Yes, I always love those answers about childhood because sometimes we forget how those foundational experiences shape us. So that's a wonderful answer. Tyler, you've been an exceptional guest. Thank you for being on the show.

Thanks for having me. This is fun.

My favorite part of this was Tyler's reflection on finding balance as he builds. Too often ambitious types lock in on an outcome and they sacrifice everything in the process and realize too late that they over indexed on the wrong things. As a person who has been singularly focused many times throughout my career, I do believe in the power of this sprint. But as we discussed, burnout is a very real thing. And our tombstones won't list our exit price or our cumulative hours worked or how many emails we processed. So I think it's important for us to reflect on the things that are most important in our lives as we build. And I think a lot of it starts with building something that is personally meaningful to us versus just chasing the thing that we believe will make the most money and then also expanding that into being thoughtful about what balance looks like across different seasons of our lives. Obviously there was a lot more packed into that conversation, so definitely give it an extra listen and share it if you found it interesting. So that is episode 242 of behind the Brilliance. Next week, media executive and author Jim Ferrari Fielding is joining me with dramatic stories from the trenches of the world's most famous companies like Disney and Fox, along with some life changing insights from his new book, All Pride, no Ego. As always, thank you so much for listening. I'll talk with you next time.