#399: Tyler Denk – Turning Down $50 Million

Think about the one thing that you have wanted to do or that interests you but you haven't been able to go all in on and then list out the reasons why you haven't and actually measure the potential downsides. Right. So as we talked about earlier, I think a lot of people say, like, oh, I can't fail, or if I take a risk and do this and it doesn't work, I'm so fucked. And the truth is, like, you probably aren't, but I think it takes, like, actually the exercise of writing out what those potential downsides are to visualize, like, what would happen in that circumstance and realize that it may not be as big of a risk that you think it is.

Tyler Dank, welcome to the show.

What's up? Thanks for having me.

Dude, you turned down a $50 million offer after 18 months of running your company.

You're very recent. Because I think that literally hit the waves yesterday. So what? To be on top of it? Numbers around there, but, yeah, that more or less. There's been offers and we have turned them down, which, I mean, that's crazy to think about.

Yeah, that must be a crazy feeling. You just started this company in October 2021, not that long ago, and then to receive an offer like that, what does that mean exactly for you and how do you think that through about whether or not to accept something like that?

I think we were a bit blessed with the timing in the sense that we were a week or two away from closing our Series A, which valued at us more than that 50 million mark. And so knowing that that was already in the works, maybe some sunk cost of, like, hey, we've been doing diligence for a month or so into this. And just what I had on the horizon of, once we raise this money, we're going to launch xyz, we're going to hire these different roles, we're going to really hit another level of growth and, like, just product functionality. And so I kind of saw, like, the two, three, four year vision of where we were going and when getting an offer before knowing that that money was coming in, it kind of like, I didn't even entertain it. I turned it down in minutes. And so I think it was. I was fortunate with the timing, right, because I was so locked and loaded on, like, we were preparing the PR and the press of the Series A. We had, like, the TechCrunch article lined up and I was, like, already starting to hire with this new money that we had coming in that the offer came in. I said, we're going for billions here. Like 50 mil is not what we're looking at. So I think things would have been different. Right? Everything's time and place. If we were going through like a tough patch where I'm like, yo, this is really tough. We're like growing a little bit slower. I don't know how much longer, like we can grind this out and then an offer comes in. Maybe it's, it's different, but that was not the case. And so we're off to the races right now.

When did you know you were going to start going for the billions? Because if I have this correctly, I heard you talk about on a previous podcast about, you know, if you had asked me three years ago if I would have taken a $50 million offer before starting this company, I would have said, yeah, of course. So at what point do you realize like, oh, we're onto something so big potentially that it could be worth billions?

Yeah, I think it's very short sighted. And that was like where I was coming from of, oh, I've been grinding for 18 to 20 months and you come in with an offer that could be life changing. Like, I think on the surface that sounds amazing. I think knowing what I know now and just the untapped potential that we haven't yet done so many things that I want to do. We've seen great traction, great growth and I still think we've been like performing at a C level in the sense of like we were stretched thin with our internal team. We weren't hiring as aggressively as we should have because we had less money. And we're just so early in this like very competitive space. When you see the acquisitions of Mailchimp at 12 billion and you see Klaviyo just filed for their, like their S1 they just released of like how much money they're doing. I think it's like 600 million arrows and different time, different place. But they took four years to get their first thousand customers. We have 150,000 signups in 20 months and have 15, 20,000 active newsletters right now. And so you kind of put things into perspective and I think we're going about things differently than Klaviyo, differently than mailchimp and a lot more powerful with a lot more potential. You kind of like fill in the pieces and it's like, I don't know, I just think we have a lot to build and I'm very optimistic. And so there is a mindset shift in 50 million in life changing. Money is nice. But like, I want to build a business that really changes the landscape of this space. And I think we have the team and the foundation to do it.

It's interesting that, you know, I was researching for this podcast and in February 16, 2017 you you go. Success begins with a mentality. What separates entrepreneurs from every other type of normal person is their unprecedented determination to solve problem after problem despite the challenges they face. It's a characteristic many describe as quote, unquote grit. And if you don't have it, I think the odds of you being a successful entrepreneur are against you. You know, a lot of the other podcasts that I listened to to prepare for this one talked about, you know, what Beehive does differently and all of the tactics that you guys have gone into. What I'm more curious about is the foundation on which those tactics are built, the mindset that got you to this place. And I'm curious when I ask you about your mindset, about what makes you different. And I quote that February 16th article that you wrote on Medium. Link down below what comes to mind today.

One crazy that you did the research to find my somewhat cringy articles from medium back in 2017 to give more context there. In college I had started a company with two buddies called venturestorm that connected entrepreneurs and startups to software developers, college founders who had no money, no marketing budget. And so kind of leans in with what you said and what the article is about of grit and like how to build something from nothing. We had to find ways to get people aware of our product and our platform without a marketing budget. And so we'd use social but we also use Medium in creating posts. And because half of our two sided marketplace was entrepreneurs, I would write these like kind of cringy try hard. Like this is what entrepreneurship is as like top of funnel lead gen to get people aware of me and the product and the platform to sign up. So that was actually a piece of Legion for our startup. I still believe what I wrote. I don't think I would like to coherently write that without feeling super cringy now or even then. But there was a purpose. I wasn't just blogging for no reason. So that's my initial reaction to you reading a post from 2017, but I don't know if that answers your question whatsoever.

I'm curious about the mindset. Like what do you think your mindset and has made it differently today and has allowed you to be in this place today versus a lot of people who start a lot of different companies and don't get anywhere close to a $50 million valuation or much more. What makes you.

Yeah, I think there's, I think there's like the zero to one cold start problem of like starting a company is very difficult from even like the foundational of how do I get it up and running to my first users to monetization and then retention. And so I think being an early employee at Morning Brew, which I wasn't a co founder, but I did see the, oh, there's four of us in an office working on something that's kind of new. It's like a newsletter. It's like a different medium than what most traditional business publications go at. And we are kind of like the newcomers who are going against the grain. Like we don't have a journalism background, we don't have a playbook, we're all 22 to 23 years old. And we're going to figure out a way to grow our audience, to innovate how we can to use the most of our limited capital and tech community capabilities to build something that is impactful to a bunch of people. And I think seeing us go from four people to when I left around 3540 people, now they're well over 200, 250 employees. I think seeing that journey, that four 23 year olds can actually build something substantial and then something that eventually led to an acquisition gets you over the hump of like, okay, I know the muscles that it takes to build something that has results. So I think a lot of it's like experience and that adds a lot to the mentality. And so reapplying that to Beehive, I think there's something of the underdog mentality is something that I think a lot of people like to rally around. We entered one of the more competitive industries. There's hundreds of email service providers, blogging websites, growth tools and having a little bit of being naive and also a little bit of arrogance that you think you can come into an already established competitive space and do it better is kind of what we had at Morning Brew and kind of the same mentality that we've adopted at Beehive of, yeah, you could send with these other platforms or try to grow your list with these platforms, but you can do it better with us and we have the data and the experience to back that up. I think it's part of the mentality that's led to a lot of our early success.

You mentioned Morning Brew and before you were at Morning Brew you worked at Deloitte and you Were figuring out in that moment, should I work at Deloitte or should I move to New York City and work for this upstart, this startup? And what, how do I do this? Like, and if your friend said to you, you can go to Deloitte and you could be one of 50,000 people doing that job, or you can go to Morning Brew and you're the only one doing it, and you said that was impactful advice to be the only one, why did that stand out so strongly?

What's funny is I never even made it to Deloitte. I signed my offer and had my start date and I actually reneged and never ended up starting A few weeks before because of that advice. I think something, it's like more of a personality thing in the sense that I've realized that I hate complacency. And so anytime I have gotten complacent in my life, I've try new things or put myself in situations where I'm kind of over my head, where I'm forced to work harder, learn something new, or be uncomfortable for a certain period of time. And so the idea of settling down near where I grew up in Baltimore, in Washington D.C. close to everything I've ever known, stay with the same group of friends, and then work in a large organization where my impact is fairly constrained into what I can do to the bottom line and really make a difference in the business, to me, just felt complacent and it didn't seem as challenging. And it also seemed like kind of like the easy way out of where I've established up until that point in my career, in my life, that I have a weird drive to do things really well. And I've seen people get stuck in organizations where they may be the best at what they do, but the organization just doesn't allow for them to flourish to their full capability and potential. And I never wanted to get stuck in a similar situation to what I know and what I was comfortable. And so going to New York for me was an opportunity to go to a new city I've never lived in, hang out with new people, and be on the ground floor of a startup that there is no roadmap, there's no mentor or supervisor telling me what to build next. It's. I am in charge of figuring it out. I'm going to fail a ton in trying to build different things, but at least I learn a lot. And I think the upside is so much higher than the downside in that circumstance. And that's kind of like a recurring Theme, I think in my life. Fast forward a little bit to after the morning brew experience. I went on to join Google. I was in New York, I'm in year four in New York, I'm in a big organization, I have a girlfriend up in New York. And I'd say in like a two month period of time, I quit Google, I broke up my girlfriend, I moved across the country to Los Angeles where I knew more or less no one, and then I started a business and launched Beehive. So the combination of moving city, moving jobs, starting a business, ending a four year relationship all in like a two month span is like as much change as you could possibly ask for. And like that's where I really thrive, is the excitement of starting fresh and putting myself in an uncomfortable situation.

Okay, so there's somebody right now listening who wants to go and transition in their life in some capacity. They want to break up with their girlfriend, they want to, they want to start a new business, they want to do something differently than what they're currently doing. What advice do you have for that person?

I think a lot of people over index on the downsides and it takes a lot of thinking to realize that the downsides are never as bad as you expect them to be. So as crazy and illogical as that may have sounded, to make all of those changes all at once with a ton of uncertainty, it was also fairly calculated and me trying to think through what is the worst case scenario of any of these decisions. Decisions. And if I end up in Los Angeles where I kind of wanted to end up, and it's a big role, there's plenty of people to meet and if this business doesn't go well, can I apply the skills elsewhere or apply for jobs, which is always an option. And so I think so many people over index on. I kind of want to take a risk and build a company or start this or launch this side project. But what if it doesn't work? And the what if it doesn't work is always so dramaticized in my perspective that people are too scared to attempt it. Where like the what if it doesn't work is never as bad as it actually seems like it could be. So my advice is very simply, like, the downsides are typically not as bad or dramatic as you expect them to be.

Yeah, and also like, if you're thinking about making a change, it's likely that you're, you're not realizing how important it is in that moment to like actually test it out in some capacity. Did you test out moving to Los Angeles before you did or you just were like, oh, I've seen that in the movies and therefore I'm going to enjoy it.

Yeah, I mean I've always, I'm a big beach person and I hate the cold weather. So I always knew that I wanted to be somewhere warm near a beach. So that was already baked in. I did actually live in LA for a month with a bunch of friends a few months before moving out. But that was like an initial like trial run, which again I think can be applied to like anything else. I just said like you can go and work on a side hustle before going all in and building in and launching a company and making that your full time job. Which is what we did at Beehive. So like we lived in Venice for a month with my four best friends over the summer. It was Covid. We worked remote, got to know the area, got to know the restaurants, got to meet a bunch of people and build like some layer of a foundation before moving out here full time. So I think there's a lot of ways to de risk things and my whole like change my entire life, move across the country, end a four year relationship, start a business. Sounds very hectic. But in between like point A and point B, there was a lot of like building on the side, testing things and like testing the waters a bit before going all in on any of those.

Yeah, that makes sense. You said before that you have a weird drive to do things well. I actually think that's the most normal drive there is and I think it's a weird drive that most people don't want to do things well.

Why?

When did you realize that about yourself, that doing things well was important to your being?

I think I agree with your statement that it's been weird to me to realize when people just do like a mediocre job at anything like they and going through rounds of interviews for all of these positions we're hiring, sometimes we'll get to a final round interview. And I was like, you have 60 minutes to do this presentation, blow it out of the water and like you have a 150,000 plus paying job on the other side at a company with equity. And, and like this is why you applied for the job is to get the job and do it. And some of the presentations are like, it looks like you put as minimal effort as you possibly could into this. Or like you just didn't go, it's good but you didn't go the extra mile to like absolutely blow it out of the water and so I've always been surprised at the lack of attention to detail and drive that people put behind certain things. And so, yeah, I guess when did I decide that I had one? I'm just someone who, from anything I do, it's a blessing and a curse. Like, it has to be like 10 out of 10. So, like, perfectionist is probably the way that a lot of people describe that. But I've always tried to be a bit of an overachiever. Whether it's like doing engineering in college, but then also launching a business on the side while in college or doing like, engineering research for absolutely no reason other, other than thinking it would look good on my resume and maybe open doors in the future, all it really did was stress me out beyond belief and add another thing on my plate in college. But yeah, I've always had a drive. And I'm sure there's like, deep rooted psychological reasons that like, a therapist could probably diagnose as to, like, why I want to achieve certain things, why I work so hard, what I'm trying to accomplish in my life. But it's also one of those things I don't question, right? Like, I know that I have a drive and like, I get excited by staying in on a Friday night and grinding and getting shit done because I know I'm working towards a goal and building something big. And while I could question, like, why is that kind of weird? And like, why do all my friends just want to go to the bar and chill and go to the beach? It's one of those things that I don't question, right? Like, I'm happy that I have that drive and I don't need to ask questions because I don't think it's going to last forever. And while I have it, I want to utilize it.

Yeah. One of your, one of the tweets that I love the most from you, is that the nerdiest thing to admit? But the quiet focus, the quiet and focus of working 3pm to midnight on Fridays is a cheat code. And I think a lot of people resonated with that because there are a lot of nerdy people on Twitter who just love to be behind the keyboard and working. And where, where do you, like, where was the first thing you've ever done where you're like, wow, I did that really well. And, like, I'm proud of myself for doing it like that.

There's a lot of recency bias here because I feel like I'm sure there's things I did in, like, kindergarten that, like, I cut between the lines better than all the classmates that I can't remember. I think one of the first, like that's really cool and like this is possible and it seems impossible was launching that company in college. And so me and my two buddies who are all engineering all like pretty strapped on time, were able to take nothing but an idea, wireframe out this app, actually build it from scratch. So we were all self taught software developers. I taught myself on online courses, how to code, taking those skills, building a website and then being able to show other people who are target users like, hey, here's a solution to your problem, sign up them, use it. That type of taking nothing, building something and then having other people sign up voluntarily and use it and get value out of it was like the zero to one that I kind of needed to like really push me towards building an entrepreneurship of just like, I don't know, I think when you grow up, you look at all these established companies that have been there and like providing products and services and by the time you're aware of them, they're so large that they have thousands of employees and they're so well oiled that you don't question it. And I think very few people have the experience of like the 0 to 1 of like here's nothing but an idea, but it should exist because it solves a problem. And I think once you get over no how, no matter how small of a win it is, to get over the hump and build something that others extract value from is extremely validating and it just kind of gives you like the oh shit, it's possible. And that's kind of like I think what kicked off a lot of like my entrepreneurial journey and everything else I've been building.

So in college you realize, oh, I'm an entrepreneur, I enjoy this process. And then you go and you work for Morning Brew. And I'm curious if you felt like, was there any envy on your part of being like, oh, I could do this, I'm capable, I see what they're doing. Why are they getting all the credit sort of thing? Because you have that background of being an entrepreneur. Did you ever feel that way?

I'd say not envy in the sense that like I did have a ton of authority and respect there and like Austin and Alex were incredible co founders and gave me a lot of room to run. They also opened a lot of doors so they have an incredible network and they'd be like, hey, let's learn from this, like let's go meet with the skim or Axios or like the CEO of this media company. And so they would set up like happy hours and drinks and networking events. That opened a lot of doors for me to learn from people who were like 10 years further in my career. So I don't think there was ever envy, but I think I was like the dream early employee for them in the sense of, like, I acted like I had like 50% of the company. And I think that's like the big difference of I. Because I do work so hard and I put like my stamp of approval and go above and beyond in whatever I could do. I never liked the, here's my salary and here's my limited upside because I felt like I was working harder and I could never different, I could never distance myself from giving a shit. So, like, I would never be like, this is like 8 out of 10, but I'm like a 9 to 5 employee and like, it's good enough and it's actually better than what was expected. It's not perfect. And if it was mine, I would go like the extra mile. But I don't need to because I'm just a 9 to 5 employee. Like, I don't have that muscle in my body. I have, like, if I'm going to do it, it's going to be done really well. Which I think drives, like, a little bit of internal tension at times if you aren't. Don't have that unlimited upside like I'm currently situated to have. Because then you're kind of like, why do I care so much if, like, human, here's my salary, it's okay, but could be better. Or like, my equity is okay, but like, it's not mine. And so I try, since that experience, I've tried to avoid putting myself in situations where I feel like everyone hates feeling undervalued. And so, like, I know that I'm going to go 110% and I just don't want to be in a situation where I can't reap 110% of the upside.

But then you go and you work for Google, so. So how do you reconcile that?

Yeah. So what led me to Google was I joined Morning Brew, as I said, when there was only two other people or three other people. So second employee. And saw that through 35 employees, we went from 50,000 subscribers to three and a half million. Great experience. It was all like, white space of, oh, we could build this. Go ahead and build that. And so I fell on my face a ton trying a bunch of things. We built a Lot of really cool things, incredible experience and kind of really just set the foundation for like my career and like where I would go after that. But I also realized very realistically that like I fell into this like product role. I had no idea what product was. I just like did engineering things that helped us grow. But I also understood the core KPIs of the business and marketing and how we were growing and what mattered and what didn't and tied together growth and marketing and product and engineering. And I took a step back and I was like, oh, that's like what a PM does. Like I'm basically doing product in this company. I had never known what product was prior and like Morning Brew is my first job ever and so new to life and career and like just didn't know what product was. So once I figured out what product was I was like, I actually have no idea how product is supposed to be done. I've like backed into this made up thing that I've made a niche for myself and this company called production. But I don't know. I have zero processes. I've never learned from a mentor or pm. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just trying to prioritize what I think is the most efficient use of my time or the resources of the team without a real rhyme or reason. And a perfect example of that is I built a cms which is like what the content team would write to create the newsletters. I spent four months on that. Every day I woke up with crippling anxiety because I didn't know if I was going to hit a road bump that, that I couldn't surpass because I'm a self taught software developer. There's no guide of what to build next. And I was also so dumb and young and naive that I didn't know why no one else was building a cms. And I was like why would. Because the other option was just to purchase or like use another third party cms. And for some reason I was like why would I pay $50,000 to use another CMS? I'll just build it myself. And so every day I'd be like, wait, why don't other people just build it themselves? Like there has to be something preventing me from getting to the finish line. And the reason why I bring that up is a refined PM would have built a full roadmap and wireframe of here's the different constituent parts, here's how it would work, here's the open source tech we're going to use. Here's how it's going to integrate with platform A and Platform B. But I was way too raw to even think big picture of how we're building this. I just woke up and built for 10 hours, went to sleep, woke up nervous I was going to hit a roadblock and kept building. So fast forwarding to what got me to Google. Once I ended up, I kind of saw the writing on the wall that like we were entering a different stage of growth at Morning Brew and I was either about to get hired over, which I wasn't a huge fan of for a bunch of different reasons, or like just the amount of like my day to day flexibility and ownership that I had was kind of dwindling a bit as we entered another stage. It's a classic. I joined as employee too. And the company grows up and not every employee grows up with the company. And so in realizing I didn't have any process or understand what product was, I started looking at other opportunities. Was interested by like series A or larger big tech companies who have processes where I could actually learn from people who have been doing it before. And Google is like known as like the gold standard of product management and process and how you're supposed to launch a feature or product. And so I went there with the intention of. I've seen three employees to 35 employees. Amazing startup entrepreneurial experience. But like for me to excel in my career, I should also learn if product is where I'm going and head of products, like maybe a future title should learn what the hell product actually is. And so Google was literally just like a stamp on the resume and extract knowledge and expertise and something I knew that I was pretty raw in the sense of what product management actually is.

That makes sense. And going back to Alex and Austin, Austin Reef and Alex Lieberman at Morning Brew, I'm curious, like what did you learn from them? What was that experience like being number two in this organization that has now has hundreds of employees and worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

Yeah, I think they're an incredible case study of two symbiotic co founders whose skill sets balance each other out in building a team for success. And so Alex was and still is like one of the most articulate people that I've ever met. He's amazing at telling a story of selling the vision of what he's trying to build, of rallying a team. He also has like the unwavering grit of like a salesperson who has like zero ego and will be told no 800 times. And he'll turn around and look at us and smile. He's like, this person's literally told me to stop emailing him for the past six weeks. I'm about to email him again and show up to his office in midtown later today until I can get this ad deal. And like, I don't have that in me to like just have zero ego, be told no a million times and just like continuously hammer it out. And the amount of times he was able to actually convert and get ad deals sourced from being told like, stop emailing me hundreds of times is crazy. So I think the grit, the sales, the determination and like the articulate nature of Alex Lieberman was like an incredible person to learn from and how to drive the vision of a company forward. Austin is like the most operational, like analytical thinker that I've ever been around. And so we were both fairly stubborn and opinionated and would spend hours in a room with a whiteboard just mapping out like the best leverage of our time and money and how we can grow faster, how we should look at cohort analysis, how we can increase our ltv, like just anything. We would just whiteboard for hours and yell at each other and just argue so much. But he was so analytical and could like take in case studies from other companies or use cases that he's seen elsewhere, apply different trends, bring them into our business and then obviously understand like where the business was failing operationally, where we needed more bandwidth, where we needed to hire, who we needed to fire. He was just very analytical and logical. So we kind of had this like vision and articulate nature of Alex and like the day to day operation. This is how we're going to get 10% better every day. Here's the people we need, here's the processes we need from Austin and they were an incredible one, two punch of co founders.

What do you wish you knew back then?

To ask for a lot more equity when I was negotiating my salary.

That makes sense. Well, what would you have done? Just like, how should somebody thinking about that situation right now who is at a startup, they have amazing potential. How should they think about asking for equity and, and getting what they're worth?

Yeah, I would say everything again kind of comes like where you are in your life and time and place. And so for me, I just moved to New York. I have $120,000 of student debt that I'm paying off. New York's extremely expensive. It's my first job out of college. I want to go out, hang out with friends, have a somewhat normal Lifestyle and also be able to live in the most expensive city in the country and be able to pay off my debt and everything else. So as far as like negotiating tactics and what I was optimizing for, I was like, give me a decent base salary so I can like live my life. And obviously being the second employee, some sort of equity and upside that I'm going to work extremely hard to extract value is there. But there's always like, for most startups it's the equity versus compensation or like salary is like the two levers that you pull in and just time and place. And me being young in my career, not having a ton of money and needing more money just to live my life. And I still was in the red. Every single month was just salary over equity. And then everything's like hindsight's 20 20, right? So when they go and get acquired for 75 million four years later, immediately your reaction is, fuck, I should have asked for a lot more equity. I'd be a lot happier if that was the case. Case. And of course, four years in the future, my salary is a bit higher, I've paid off some of my debt. I'm in a different place financially where it's easy to say I should have optimized for equity. So I think it's really just understanding what your personal situation is and what your sentiment is on the business that you are working with. I always had a ton of conviction that Morning Brew was going to be very successful or else I wouldn't have taken that leap in the first place. My three months that I was working on contract with them, they gave me full access to the inbox and all of the different touch points we were having with our readers and customers and advertisers. And so I saw when I was like contracting and building the referral program, thousands of emails come in every day of people saying, I just share this with my entire class, with my entire family. Like, I love your newsletter. I can't start my day without it. So I had all of the touch points of like, I think they're onto something. And I can see a path forward where whether we go into education or other types of products or just really hammer out newsletter as a product, there's like a huge appetite for this. So I had all of the signals that it was going to be successful. I just didn't have the personal financial situation to say I'm comfortable in optimizing for equity and not for cash compensation.

Yeah. And what's cool is you're taking all the Lessons that you've learned from Morning Brew and I'm sure a little bit at Google as well and building Beehive with that. With those lessons I'm curious about though, you know, everyone will see, wow, this company is a massive success. Holy smokes. I can't believe this guy did this. This guy's incredible. What have been some of the more difficult moments or unexpectedly, quote unquote bad moments that you're grateful for now looking back at them?

Yeah, definitely a lot. I'd say there's always the classic startup of like if you launched it and it's perfect, it's too late. And so the epitome of that is like we launched an MVP into an incredibly competitive space. So when we Launched back in 2021, Substack was by far the market leader in this new newsletter website space with like premium subscriptions and everything. So they were like the venture backed market leader Twitter just acquired Revu, I think like six to eight months before we launched. So like that was Twitter, large company, big tech getting into this Facebook just announced bulletin like two months prior. So another big tech company, you have Facebook and Twitter now getting into like the paid newsletter space. You have a venture backed favorite and leader in the space that's been around for four or five years. And then you have all the incumbents from Mailchimp and SendGrid and Campaign Monitor, sell through and the hundreds of other email service providers. Plus you can throw in like WordPress. And so like there's no shortage of competitiveness and alternative solutions for users when we enter the market to choose to send emails and create content. And so what that does is a few things. One, it adds a shit ton of pressure because we didn't launch with a perfect product. We're still not done with our initial roadmap and we're 20 months past when we initially launched. And what that does on the day to day is extremely strenuous because a lot of the feedback is, hey, this looks really interesting. I think you solved some of my pain points. You're just missing these four massive foundational features that every other competitor has. So I can't actually use your software until you have that. And these are not like you snap your fingers and two weeks later these features are built. These are like quarter long initiatives. And so the day to day of like one solving a pain point enough to get off the ground and get that initial traction is like, oh shit, it's working. Like we are now making $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month. Like I Can't believe we took this hypothesis and now $10,000 a month is flowing in from people that we don't know who are choosing to pay us. But then you go through the support tickets and they're like, hey, we really need automation. And it's like, okay, well that's like a two quarter long project and we haven't even started it yet. So then every day you wake up with the uncertainty and like the insecurity that your top users are about to leave. Because when your largest newsletter emails you, hey, we really need to launch automations like next week and you're like, okay, that's like four months out earliest, like that stress is extremely difficult to deal with on a day to day basis. I'd also say we've kind of established ourselves as launching features very quickly and I think it's derived from that story I just told. We launch in a very competitive space and the insecurities of knowing that we didn't have a lot of the core foundational features that other platforms had. The we will launch things very quickly was very intentional from day one because I wanted to show, yes, we don't have that yet, but look how much we can launch in this short of a time period. So whatever you think we are missing, it's not like we're blind and not building it. We just haven't got there yet. And we'll get there. And so when I send our product update emails to our entire user base, it's a very non negligible amount of people who actually signed up months before being like, hey, I was actually waiting for this one feature. Now that you launched it, I'm going to sign up and move my newsletter over today. So to answer your question more directly, one of the biggest pain points is just like we chose not to innovate in a brand new space, we decided to enter one of the more competitive industries in SaaS. And so the day to day stress of knowing that we are the new player with the least amount of functionality and features yet we're competing with people that have been around for 5, 10 plus years and venture backed up on a day to day basis adds a ton and ton of stress and anxiety around everything, which I also think has been used as an incredible driver. And like why we still have like when I step away to go to dinner on a Wednesday night, I still have that anxious uneasiness of like is there a big user asking something that we don't have yet? Or like how did the support queues look? Or are we Launching fast enough because I think that anxiety from the early days of knowing we weren't enough but we were punching above our weight has carried over in like the DNA of the company to this day. And we still launch just as quickly and have that underdog anxiety of we need to do more quicker or we're going to lose market share. And that's something I'm hoping remains a part of the DNA until we, I mean honestly, forever really.

What's that? Daily screen time at screen time.

So a good amount. I wake up at 5:30 every morning. Most of I'm on the west coast and most of the teams on the east coast. So my first hours like me being like OCD about productivity and unblocking people. Like my nightmare is someone being like hey, I don't know do I do A or B and I'm just asleep or like I'm like at the gym and like I'm not unblocking them and that's just like wasted time that they're not spending being productive. So my first hour when I get up at 5:30 is unblocking whoever I can if there's any discrepancy in like hey, should I do this or this? Like just making sure everyone has a game plan on the east coast supposed to deliver. Usually I do that the night before, but first hours up go to the gym, come back around 8am and from 8am till about 9:30, 10pm I'm pretty much locked in to this exact position that you're looking at me now. So I spend a lot of time in this quarter of my room.

What do you do to like unplug Other than the gym, is there anything that helps you just remove the noise?

Yeah, I definitely need to do more of that. The gym is like a muscle. Every morning I'm in the gym for like an hour and a half. Like that is where I try to like not touch my phone, not look at slack and actually just listen to music and like unplug. Beyond that I've found a lot of interest in activities that are the complete opposite of my day to day stress and work. So yoga, I'm really into hot yoga, really into surfing, hiking, peloton. So like typically active activities but like primarily I'd say yoga and surfing is like the most mindless, peaceful. Can't have your phone on you so there's no distraction. Like you're really just in the moment. Those are kind of like the activities I've been optimizing for more because there's such a 180 for my day to day stress.

Yeah, I mean David Perel said I've never seen a company ship at the speed and volume you're shipping at. And yeah, that's because Tyler's at his desk for 14 hours a day and he's, he's just non stop at it. How has your personal life, in terms of relationships changed at all from running this company and spending so much time on work? Because you know, there are a lot of founders and creators and people who are in their work a lot. Listening to this podcast, I'm curious how you navigate through relationships.

Yeah, I mean it's definitely suffered, right? Like I have made a conscious decision that as a 29 year old single male in Los Angeles, I have an opportunity and I've seen the traction and early success to really capitalize on this. And for me like the opportunity cost and like me having to live with the rest of my life that maybe I over optimized on like going on too many dates or socializing or traveling too much and like squandered an opportunity that could be life changing in terms of financial success or freedom or whatever that looks like. Like, I don't know if that's something I could live with. I think it's like the classic loss aversion of it's a lot harder in human psychology to lose something or perceive to lose something than to gain. And so we do have a ton of traction and I always try to reframe it with whenever I'm super stressed, which is all the time. Like me three years ago would have done anything to be in the situation that I'm in now. We have 30 employees, I'm running a tech company that I'm very passionate about, we have a ton of momentum and the day to day as stressed as I am is actually really fun and we're solving challenging problems. So like I. My entire life I've been super into startups and entrepreneurship. I would have given anything to be leading a series, a venture backed startup that has a ton of momentum and a lot of really smart people building something that I find really interesting. So with that frame, yes, I'm a psychopath and I sit in my room for way too long and I work way too hard. But I also like being that psychopath right now and I don't think I trade it for anything. I have a few failed relationships, I've distanced myself from some of my friends a bit more than I'd like to and I'm pretty aware of it at least. But that's kind of like a known trade off. I used to like, try to stress balance way too much, which sounds like very normal. And I do go out on the weekends. I try to hit the beach as, as often as I can. I do different activities. Also. As a remote company, I've spent like two to three months living in Mexico City or Medellin to just kind of get a different perspective and live in a different area and try different experiences and take advantage of like the remote lifestyle. But yeah, I mean, it's a lot. I'm not as social as I used to be, for sure. And I used to never be able to understand how people cannot answer texts in a timely manner because, like, dude, it's not that fucking hard to respond. But I go like 6 hours without checking my phone and when I do, I'm so overwhelmed, I just don't answer. So I've become that guy. So, I mean, that's like the very honest answer. Like on the outside, things are going great, the company is great. And again, I wouldn't trade it for anything. But the day to day of sitting alone in my room for like 14, 16 hours a day, always stressed, always getting like both positive and negative feedback and input from users from the risk or potential loss of are we going to succeed? Did I just waste two years of my life building something and sacrificing everything to not have like the potential payoff that I think it could be one day? Like, there's a lot of psychological stress and anxiety involved in everything. So that's like the very real answer of my day to day mental well being.

I appreciate that. And when, when that stress comes, is it like stress when, when you hit your head on the pillow of like, I don't know if this is gonna work, Is it stress while you're working? Like break down that stress for me?

Yeah, I actually sleep pretty good and surprising, I think I'm just so exhausted by the time I go to bed. Um, I, I'd say there's like a lot of levels to the stress. So there's a level of stress of I'm trusted with 30 people to pay their paycheck and like they could have. There's so many smart, talented people on our team that could have jobs anywhere. Yet I convinced them and like now it's easier said that we are series A, have a little bit more money in the bank and are like quote unquote, a bit more secure. But there was a time when we had a million dollars in the bank and we're burning Half of that per month, hypothetically, in expenses, which. And they could have jobs anywhere. They have families, they have kids, they have vacation homes, whatever it may be. And I sold them a vision of what we're building and where we're going and that they could play an integral part in that. And like, that's like a real stress of just providing for other people and their families and that they trusted me as a leader to guide them there. And so there's that level of stress. There's the users who. What I've realized in what we're doing, it's not like a hobbyist, like Snapchat type thing, but we have people running their full business on our infrastructure and if something goes wrong and their advertiser doesn't pay them or something doesn't go out properly, like, that's real revenue lost for our users that looks poorly on us, which looks poorly on me. And just being of how we've been able to grow this thing a lot from like early relationships and hustling, like I'm in DMs with all of these users and when something goes wrong, like it's their revenue or their business or their reputation that took a hit that they're now blaming me. And these are relationships I've curated for years. Especially earlier on when we were like two months into this thing, like, we had no business, we were like, not. We didn't have the infrastructure, we didn't have the functionality to the features that when we would have a user say, yeah, I'll pay for a year of this, my first reaction was like, that's awesome. And then it was pure panic of, wait, wait. They just trusted us for a year to launch their newsletter. We, we've been around for four months and have no infrastructure and no capabilities relative to the competitors. Granted, I know what we're building and we'll get there. But like that gap between what you sell a potential customer on in the early days versus what is actually like the day to day operations and infrastructure, it's very scary for me to see that difference and know that they're trusting me. And so there was like a lot of imposter syndrome in the early days of like, I can sell beehive left and right when we had nothing and I did. And then when they convert, I'd be like, fuck. Like, I sure hope we don't mess this up because I just sold. And they just moved their entire 100,000 person list that's been running smoothly on this competitor for three years. And the second we mess up. Like, I just misled them entirely and that's my fault. So it's a little bit of me rambling of, like, the anxieties that are constantly happening, but it's like team anxieties. It is user anxieties, it's competitive anxieties. And then it's just like, opportunity cost and trade off of, like, my life, my time. I live my life with all of these anxieties. I could be doing anything else, but I'm choosing to do this. So, like, am I making the right decisions and am I prioritizing my life in the correct way? And I think I am, but it's a lot to think about when you're sitting in your room alone all day long.

Yeah, well, it's funny how that theme just keeps popping up over and over again, which is you saying you can do something and then not knowing if you can do it and then doing it anyway. And I think that's something. You know, you did it with building the cms, you did it with moving to la, you did it with now selling beehive. Like, that idea of maybe you can do it before you're ready. Maybe if you believe in yourself enough, if you have enough confidence in actually building the vision. And I think a lot of people don't have that, but could learn from you in that sense. Because it's not like you're just promising things that never come. You're promising things that aren't there yet, building them, finding out or figuring out a way to build them and then attacking that. And I don't think that. I think people could take more of that in their life in some capacity.

I think I'm also putting myself in situations where I know I will not let you let myself fail. Like, there is no backup plan. So when I moved to la, like, that was the goal. And, like, I have too much of an ego to be like, oh, I fucked up on going back to the east coast. When I was building the CMS at Morning Brew. I'd be three months into this. It's my first job ever post college. So, like, they paid one third of my salary to go on something that I said I could build. Like, I can't turn around tail between my legs and be like, yo, I actually fucked up. I can't build this. And I just wasted whatever 50k of my salary building this solution that, like, just straight up did not work and you just paid me for nothing for the past four months. Like, that was never an option. So, like, I was never going to get to that point, whatever it took. And so same with Beehive. Like I promised our users early days that we would do something and I don't have, whether it's ego or just drive reputation, like I cannot go back to them and say, I misled you, we fucked up, we let you down. I'll acknowledge when we slip up like I own it. And we've made mistakes for sure, but the broad mistake of this failing or us not being able to deliver on what we promised, I don't have the ability to just own the fact that we can't do that. So whether it means hiring more, me working longer, other people working harder, we will find a way to make it work because I don't think my ego or whatever can take failure or it not working. And that's a lot of the drive to push this forward. Board.

Yeah, I found out from doing research for this that you, one of your favorite entrepreneurs, or perhaps your favorite is Elon Musk. And it sounds very similar to what he has, how he has lived his life, basically saying, okay, well I'm going to promise this big thing and we're going to get it done for you. And a lot of people saying that's crazy. And then him working his ass off to make that happen and then him actually make it happen and people being like, how, how did that happen? Right. So there's a lot of similarities there.

Yeah. Now that's such a controversial take. But like I loved Elon going back like eight, ten years ago. Like I think the Wait, but why? By Tim Urban series on Elon Musk in terms of like Tesla and Space X and Mars. And I thought that was like some of the best pieces of writing that I've ever read. It's like my number one recommended piece is like his four part series on Ellen. And this is I think is like six or seven years ago. But my interest beyond newsletters are like deep tech, engineering, space and I just found like Tesla, green energy, SpaceX. Actually one of the first times I came out to LA, I made a final round interview at SpaceX which I was super unqualified for. When I was coming out of college I had like such a weird background in the sense that I was mechanical engineering by trade. So like what I went to school for is mechanical engineering. I never did a mechanical engineering internship. I taught myself how to code and tried building a startup in college. College. So I'm self taught coding but never had a software experience like internship or experience in a professional setting. It was all Self taught and me building my own thing. But I was engineering taught but never had an engineering experience or internship. So it's kind of like this hybrid of like I kind of know both, but I don't have, I'm not qualified to do either. And so I somehow tricked SpaceX into interviewing me and they flew me out to, to la, in which case I got into a room. It's actually a pretty funny and sad story. I remember the recruiter walking me through like what the super day would look like. It's like eight interviews with all these different people. She goes, the first part's a presentation and if you make it past that, here's like the next seven interviews. And I was like, what do you mean if you make it past that? You mean like there's a chance that I flew all the way across the country to LA, I get my 45 minute presentation and like there is no other round of interviews. Like you just cut my day short. And I thought that was so funny and dumb. And then I presented to a room of rocket, like literal rocket scientists and they just asked me questions that I thought I could like bullshit my way out of because I didn't know the answer. And one learning experience, you can't like just own what you don't know. And I didn't know that at the time. So I tried like tricking rocket scientists into things that I knew that they didn't, which didn't go well. And so needless to say, I didn't make it past that presentation and I just sat. They cut me loose early and I had all these hopes and dreams of working at SpaceX with Elon and thought that was going to be the coolest experience ever. And I sat on the pier in Manhattan beach by myself just thinking all day instead of doing interviews. So that was a really humbling experience. But huge tangent from Elon being one of the people I look up to. I just love hard tech and science and stuff that he works on.

What do you think about when you're.

Sitting on the beach that day one, to me it felt like the ticket to la. Like again, I've always kind of wanted to live on the west coast by the beach, warm weather and like, what better way than to get as cool as a job as I could possibly imagine out of college, like doing engineering at SpaceX, like at a time, what was it, 2016. So younger, very ambitious, like just an awesome first job. And so me, like on the heels of reading about Elon, I read all the books about him. I Read the blog posts, I'm self taught, everything very under qualified for this job. And the fact that I made it to like the final round of getting a one way ticket to Los Angeles to work for like my dream company. And like I think space is the coolest thing ever. It was very humbling of like I almost had something great and blew it. So I mean, honestly one of the more down days I've ever had. It was like pretty depressing sitting by myself on the pier of Manhattan beach when I had like that ticket and like everything I wanted in front of me. In retrospect, all that did was set me up for everything that came after, which is like that drive was just placed elsewhere. Austin calls me a few months later to talk about Morning Brew and opportunities and like building different things for Morning Brew, which leads me to New York, which leads to like an incredible four years of my time in New York and building Morning Brew, which led me to newsletters, which led me to Beehive. So I'm not like an everything happened for a reason because something else could have went a different way and everything could have turned out amazing in a different set of circumstances. But I'm certainly not unhappy with the way that things have unfolded because of that experience.

Yeah, that, that's a super cool story. Thank you for sharing it. What happened with GoDaddy?

Yeah, so they're not my favorite DNS provider at the moment or ever really. We use GoDaddy just to like buy beehive.com, store it, whatever. That was like our DNS provider and forgot the exact circumstances. But more or less. I've only taken off one day on vacation this entire year and I was at a bachelor party in Cabo. And of course like while we're like playing drinking games and like I'm fairly drunk, like my tech, my phone's blowing up from like the team being like, hey, like a lot of websites are kind of like going down. We're getting a ton of support tickets. People can't, like we can't figure out why the site is kind of like malfunctioning. And I was like, what use am I at this point? Like, I'm drunk. The engineers are on top of it. People are looking at it like things have happened before. They can figure it out. And so I'm kind of monitoring for like the next three to four hours and like it's not solved and it's getting worse and I'm like, oh shit. Like I'm more drunk now, but I at least like I'm Sitting down. I should like look at things and see if there's anything I can look into. And for whatever reason, something came to me that I did see an email from go. I decided to check my email and there's an email from GoDaddy being like, yo, we're rescinding your certificate or whatever. Like you are no longer like, we're not your DNS provider. Like we're shutting down beehive.com and I was like, holy shit. Like, so I'm actually the blocker here. Like they contacted me one. I don't know why they did that. Well, I went on to find out why, but at the time I like passed it to the team. I was like, I think it's a GoDaddy issue. And more or less because we are sending emails and hosting websites on behalf of thousands of different users. One user was like a spammer, did like some sort of phishing campaign. They sent a phishing email through our servers which lands on beehive.com and so GoDaddy got a complaint. We don't have a relationship with anyone there. So they took like the immediate. I think they gave us 24 hours. But I was also at the bachelor party, traveling there 24 hours prior. So I missed the email. 24 hours isn't a massive window to pull down your entire website. So they just like rescinded our certificate. So beehive.com went down. All the thousands of users that we have that are hosted on like a dot P beehive.com domain became unavailable. So all of our users websites went down. And here I am at 8pm in Cabo, pretty hammered, trying to figure out like what to do and like if it was already. It was like a Thursday night. If Friday came around and all of our users lost full access to their website, they couldn't log in their users, their readers couldn't access their content. It's kind of like game over. And I knew it was real. When my CTO DMs me, he goes, because we had like a group chat of like, how do we with deal debug this situation? And he DMs me on the side, he goes, don't want to alarm you, but this is as catastrophic as it could possibly be. And that was the most sobering message I've ever received. And I go, I guess we got to figure this out. So that sobered me up. I called customer support, was on the phone with like their overseas India team till like 1am missed the rest of the bachelor party that night. Like, they all went out to dinner. I'm on customer support. We're, like, scraping databases trying to find any Senior Leadership at GoDaddy to contact or tweet. Tweeting. I send an email to all of our investors, like, do you know anyone at GoDaddy? But anyway, that was the most catastrophic thing that's ever happened because I think we ended up. Eventually I got in contact with someone in India and I escalated to a manager, and I was like, you don't understand. Like, if this doesn't get resolved tonight, like, our business is done. Like, we're. We're going under. Like, you, we will be unemployed if this happens by tomorrow morning. So you have to escalate this to someone. And they finally, like, lifted the restriction and granted it. And then we just moved to a different DNS server the next day. But, like, that was as scary and potentially catastrophic of an experience. Funny to look back on, but also very unfortunate.

How long ago was that?

February of this year. It also, like, it's a. It's a real gut check into, like, doing an analysis of where are you most vulnerable or where are you not? Like, what are assumptions you make in the business that are steady, that if that assumption is wrong, everything could fail. And that was definitely one of them. Like, I never thought our DNS provider would revoke our certificate and, like, literally crash our entire website overnight. So sobering experience. Not the biggest fan of GoDaddy, but that was that chapter.

But what are you supposed to do? Like, if you're even hearing that on a podcast, right? It's not, like, what could somebody realistically do to make sure that doesn't happen?

So that was a vulnerability that I didn't know existed. Like, I didn't know that you could trust your DNS service and they could revoke it at any time. We've moved over. We use cloudflare now and Cloudflare because we're a larger client. And, like, on an enterprise plan, we actually have, like, account managers and people with, like, phone numbers and emails that I can get in contact with. Not to, like, shit on one of our competitors. But, like, one common occurrence with, like, mailchimp that people always complain about is, like, customer support is, like, all chatbots and AI that push you to support articles, and you can never get in contact with a real human if you tried. And, like, that was the helplessness and experience I felt with GoDaddy of, like, I was on customer support emergency lines for four hours overseas, like, trying to figure out, like, how to get through to Someone where, like, now, if anything like that happened with Cloudflare, like, I have like six contacts there. So I'd say the takeaway and lesson there would be any of, like, your core infrastructure. If you're a tech platform, like, any core infrastructure or foundational tech, like, make sure you have a relationship with an account manager or person there. If, God forbid, something terrible happens, it'll probably save you a lot of stress.

I think you just got a lot of people off GoDaddy, for what it's worth.

But I don't even. I don't. I don't talk. I don't talk shit about that many things, but that, like, I lost years of my life from that and saw, like, my entire business crumbling. So I don't give a very fair.

You know, we've touched on a lot of the Dow moments from this journey, and I'm curious what you could give by way of the ultimate high or, like, what felt like the high at that moment. Like, oh, my God, it's actually working. This is insane. This is amazing. I'm sure there's a lot to pick from, but give us one that really sticks out in your head.

Yeah. Damn, that's loaded. Because I feel like people always say, like, oh, entrepreneurs have, like, so many highs and they'll have, like, the highest high and the lowest low in the same week. And I'm like, bro, like, same hour. We all, like, have, like, a candidate that I'm so hyped on. Like, turn us down and I go, fuck like that. Like, I was already banking. I was already setting up their first two weeks. Like, I thought we had, like, a massive unlock and then we'll have a, like a massive user out of nowhere. Migrate over. That's like a huge name. I'll be like, holy shit, we're on top of the world. And like, that happens, like, minute to minute. So lots of highs, lots and lows, which is the advice everyone always gives, is like, don't get too high and don't get too low. But it's impossible. I'd say some of the bigger highs. So again, recency bias. We just had Arnold Schwarzenegger move his newsletter over from a competitor. And so my initial reaction was like, probably like a gimmicky, like, pump iron, like, cheesy workout newsletter. He actually has an amazing team of content creators. He actually pitches in and adds quotes and stories, like Day to Day for the newsletter. And it's like a 10 out of 10 newsletter. It's amazing. They have over half a million subscribers. So they're huge and they have all these ambitions of making it one of the largest newsletters in the world. It being top of funnel for community and app and their Netflix series. So like full content strategy and I mean everyone knows Arnold Schwarzenegger. We actually had like, we have an email developer in Australia and we had like a small like email issue where typically I like DM him, I'm like, yo, I think this is broken. Can you take a look into it? He'll get around to it. When he gets around to it, I go by the way, like Arnold Schwarzenegger is the one asking about this like it's his team and he's like, no way, I'll be back and like fixes it like right away. So like he kind of has like that like notoriety and like the name. So that's pretty cool. But there's like, I'd say it is pretty cool when you have like JJ Redick has a newsletter with his media company on us. So I think when there's these big name artists, musician, athlete, content creators who are like on the other side of the keyboard typing away in our text editor or building tools and things in our platform and I'm just like emailing with them like it's a pretty again, it goes to like that 0 to 1 of like it feeling real of it's so hard to get off the ground and it feels insurmountable. And then you're like, when you're there it's like, does anyone really give a shit? But when you have very notable people that others know, launching, using, giving like product feedback, hey, it'd be really nice if I could do this with my website. It's like, dude, you're like J.J. redick. Like that's pretty fucking cool. Like stuff like that. That is pretty awesome. And definitely those highs are pretty great.

Yeah. And you've built this company entirely remote, is that correct?

Yep. What's that experience? So I can't imagine it any other way. Like I think it is again my at Morning Brew, I love nothing more than going to the office. We had 10 people in their young 20s that were all so smart and ambitious but also cool. Like come in, talk about your date from the night before and like hang out. But then we're also pushing out all these new initiatives and building and growing so quickly and so like the in office experience plus like the cold brew on tap and then like hanging out and like going to happy hours after. Like I loved going in the office and just whiteboarding and hanging out with Other people. So when Covid hit again, I wasn't equipped. I was like, had a small, tiny apartment in New York, not equipped to work from home. And I was the grumpiest person in the world. I was like, I miss the office, I miss cold brew. I don't want to sit on my couch and do work. So I was the most anti work from home person. Then you get acclimated, you get a desk, you, like, kind of set up your home office a little bit. And then it totally flipped for me where I was like, one, I fucking hate commuting. Like, sitting on like the sweaty subway for 45 minutes to and from where I could be doing literally anything else productive. But I'm just sitting on this subway grant. I like, listen to a podcast, but I ended up hating commuting and just saw it as like, literally wasted time. And I think that's like the big mindset shift. As, like, as I launch B, I've become like a total, like, productivity to my own demise of, like, what can I be doing that's more productive than what I'm doing right now? And I just view commuting as like a total waste of time. So removing that is one, two, like, the flexibility of being in your own house, being comfortable, wearing what you want, not needing to, like, impress or wear certain types of clothes, like make lunch when you want, eat when you want, whatever. Like, personal lifestyle and flexibility is great. And then I think it's the most archaic thing that you restrict talent to a small geographic location. Like, if I was building Beehive with only people who live within like 20 miles of LA, we would not have the talent or success that we've experienced, like, for a fact. And so the fact that we have people from India, Colombia, the Netherlands, all across the United States, Canada, like, we have so many people and we are picking the most talented by their talent. Not that they live close to where the founders live, I think is like a huge differentiating factor. And I think it's actually wild the opposite that you would like, post up in HQ in Orlando, Florida and say, we're only hiring people who can make it to the office three times a week. I think that is so crazy. And as far as, like, tactically, that's just like, the talent and upside. Tactically, I think it's a competitive advantage because I think people are comfortable in their home. And like, once they see those benefits, similarly, it just unlocks a lot of productivity. And then I also think that it, one, we just have access to talent wherever. Two, the way that I've been able to scale the business is learning how to communicate more effectively. And so I write a very, very detailed weekly email, more often than not, every Sunday, of, like, here's the 20 things going on in my head. It's mostly for me, honestly, because I'm going crazy. I was like, I just need to get these thoughts out. But it's also supposed to be a. Everyone on the team reads it and understands exactly, like, what role they're playing in the broader picture of, okay, I'm building this because it's a part of this initiative, because this is our goal for the quarter. And, like, I try to, like, paint that picture for the entire team every single week. And so it's made me better as a leader and a communicator to understand, like, how do I make everyone from support to engineering to marketing understand what their role is in the company? And, like, what are the overarching company goals? And, like, how are we swimming towards those and then working backwards from there? So I've loved being a remote team. I constantly bitch about, like, me being in my room alone for 16 hours, which is true, but that is because, like, the alternative is, like, honestly just less efficient. And, like, hopefully there's a point where every minute doesn't feel like, am I getting the most efficiency out of this minute, but for a time and a place, and right now, being 18 months into this in a very competitive space, me figuring out how to maximize my time and effort towards something that's pushing the company forward is the only thing I care about.

Yeah, it also sounds like writing plays a big role in that. How have you become a better writer? Or what would you recommend to people to become better writers other than just writing more?

So given that I feel like a lot of people who listen to your podcast probably are starting a business, considering starting a business, already have a startup. One of my recommendations and hacks that I've recommended to all of my startup entrepreneur friends is to send a monthly investor update. And there's a few reasons why. One, it's not just for investors. It's for friends, family, colleagues, employees. Any meeting that I had that, like, I'll add you to the list, right? Like, anyone that I had a good experience with or, like, I think would be interested in, like, the journey of what we're building. Like, I want them involved. So it adds one accountability. Like, I know, no matter. Like, no matter what, I am volunteering to send this email. Like, our investors aren't requesting, requiring it, but I know at the End of every month, I'm going to have to write an email about what's working, what's not working, what we're building and how I see the company evolving. And so there's a level of accountability of if I know when I have to send the email, I want it to be really good. And I want people to read the email, be like, yo, they're crushing it. And so there's like that constant, like, motivation of like, what can I maximize in the next 30 days? So this investor update crushes it and blows it out of the water. So there's an accountability aspect. There's a, again, kind of what I do with the full team emails weekly or biweekly is like getting everyone on the same page. Like, it may seem day to day, like you're deep in support tickets, or we're launching this one nuanced feature, but it's all part of the broader plan. And you can see that 10,000 foot view through this investor update. It's like raw numbers. So, like, you can't. There's nowhere to hide. Like, revenue is either going up or down, growth is going up or down. And so there's a lot of accountability baked into it. And then I'd also say on top of like just aligning everyone from employees to investors and having other people come along to the journey. One of the best pieces of advice I received years ago, I saw like some person speak and he had like four, like cheat codes to life and I forgot three of them. But the one that always stuck with me was always try to be top of mind and whether or not like, someone has an extra ticket to like the Dodgers game and you're like the first person that pops up or whatever it is in life, like, you want to be in situations where people naturally think of you. And so this investor update has friends that I haven't talked to since high school, fraternity brothers from back in college that actually my only touch point with them is this investor update. But I add like at the top a little bit, like, hey, I'm going to Hawaii on a vacation, or like, hey, we just did this, or I just got back from whatever. So it's bringing them along on my journey of both life and the business. And so we've remained top of mind for these 350 people on this list. And when they go, hey, this person just got laid off at this company, they're looking for a new role. I saw you're hiring for design because I sent that email and it hit their inbox yesterday. They knew to send that design person directly to me. And so some combination of the storytelling, the accountability, and just getting more people involved on your journey is why I'm such a huge advocate of the monthly investor updates and why we have 350 people on that list.

It's a great tip and I can't wait to read your next one. I'll add you what's the weirdest habit you have? I often find that people I talk to, high performers, they have something weird about them that they do often, that they don't often speak about because they're not asked. What is your weirdest habit?

One I probably already alluded to is like, I don't know, it's not even that weird. But like I'm always in like a continuous optimization problem in my life, right? So it's like if I have an hour, most people would be like, let me just watch an episode of whatever on Netflix. I'm like, should I read this book? Should I practice Spanish more? Should I do X, Y, Z? But like, I don't have like an off switch, which I need to probably get better at is 1, 2 is I'm maybe it's not as weird, but super routine oriented. And so my ideal is to wind down work at I say nine o' clock every night and it usually isn't, but I try nine. I study Spanish for 45 minutes and then I read for 45 minutes. And like that is like my level setting of like being in a routine. And whenever I go out to like a net, even if it's a networking, productive dinner on a Wednesday meeting, not being able to go back to that routine like, throws me out of whack. So I have like a lot of like normalizing habits that keep me in routine and keep me focused.

I love that. And in doing research for this, I found out that one of your favorite books, if not your favorite, is the Go Giver, a little story about a powerful business idea by John David Mann and Bob Burke. What made that one so impactful?

It's a good book. It's been a while since I've read it and I feel like every time I'm asked what my favorite book is, it may change. So shout out to like Thinking Fast and Slow is like another one that I'm obsessed with psychology and like how people think. And it's a lot of like marketing and perception and building telling stories and narratives. The Go giver, if I recall it's been a while is really just like the perception or act of like giving more than what you receive and going the extra mile to put other people before you and providing value without any expectation of receiving anything. And so without me completely butchering the book because again, it's been a few years, I do think if that is direction, if that is correct in what I think it is, which I'm pretty sure it is, I do think that is like a cheat code in life where a lot of people are constantly like, I'm only doing this for me or like will only volunteer to do things because at the end of the road there's something that they get in return. And I've taken a step back and realized that a lot of the opportunities I've been granted and a lot of the relationships that I've built over time is because I put myself in a situation to help someone else out without the expectation of ever receiving something and knowing that one they may never return the favor. And that's fine. Or that favor may be delayed yet years. It's totally cool. But like I think people that have a very shortsighted and myopic view of I'm only spending time doing things that give me an immediate return ends up playing the short game a lot better than the long game. And I think those that prioritize playing the long game end up having a lot more success.

Couldn't agree more. So thinking fast and slow. The Go Giver. Are there any other impactful books that you gift? Often.

I the fact that you say gift is great because I've actually learned that books are an amazing gift as a little life hack because it shows that you actually know someone and what they would like and then whenever they think about that book, they think of you. So I actually do give gift books a good bit. So again like recency bias. I love Burn Rate by Andy Dunn, which is the Bonobos founder who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and it's his journey. Like I grew up in high school and college wearing Bonobos pants a ton. So like I was always a huge fan of the brand. But how he was, it was just like a. It's like a mental health type story. And I read it like peak of me probably going through a failed relationship while also building a company while also sitting in my room while also going through all of the stress and anxiety that I've always had. And I think everything is like relative in the sense that I'm going through like this company building journey that feels like a bottomless pit of like you're working so hard and you don't always see the rewards of what you're building. And it's like you could go through days or weeks at a time where it's negative feedback. High churn features get delayed, bugs pop up that you weren't expecting, which delays everything else. A big user migrates to another platform, a top candidate turns down your offer to go somewhere else. And like there can be total weeks and even months of just negative news on negative news. And that when you layer in how much you're giving up to build a company, what you're sacrificing in friends and relationships and other life experiences, like there can be a bottomless pit of like this is a lot. And so I think reading that book one hit me at a time when I was probably going through one of the darker times of just like building the company, but also seeing someone talk about mental health, but building a multi hundred million dollar business and being able to like kind of disguise his mental health issues because he thought that was the way about going about it. I don't know, I just thought it was really interesting. I actually just met him for dinner last week too at like a dinner that our investors led. So it was cool getting to meet him personally. But that was another great book I read recently.

Very cool. What's been the experience, like meeting people you've looked up to?

I'd say it's definitely one of the cooler things of building a company. I think a lot of people optimistically try to position themselves of like, hey, maybe if I just meet this one person, they'll give me a chance and like that'll be my big break. And I've always been like, why don't you just build something of value and put yourself in a situation where they want to get know you. And because we have fortunately had a lot of success to date and like we have like great investors who are super connected or we have people that are launching new newsletters or initiatives in the content space. Like it has opened up doors to people that I've either looked up to or find really interesting. And so I'd be lying if I said that wasn't part of the excitement and drive of continuing to build something of value is for what I am lacking in social life at times, being grinding and building this company, ideally I make up for it and then some and some of the doors that I can open up and the people and relationships I can build. But huge advocate of kind of like building your own destiny in the sense of like working hard and building something of value so people want to be around You. I've met a lot of people, especially out in la, who are either trying to make it acting or this or that. And they're like, if only I can get in the door at this one talent agency and like, maybe they see like my real maybe, maybe I'll be big. And it's just like it's really hard to put yourself in a situation where it's at someone else's hands to decide who may be having a terrible day or they're the dictator of where you are going to go. Like anything you can do to own your own narrative and position yourself for success.

Yeah, it's always boggled my mind how people can attempt to base their own self worth based on one person's opinion. To me that seems like a very finicky place to live when you even think about like a job or you think about an actor. It's like if one person can determine whether you win or lose, like try to increase the scope. Which is why GoDaddy is not used by Beehive anymore, so.

Exactly.

Thank you Tyler for taking the time here today. I like to end these podcasts with challenges for the audience to take what we've talked about and actually do something with it. Does a challenge come to mind from anything we've spoke about or something we haven't covered yet, for someone to live the best possible version of their life?

Yeah, I think one that jumps out to me would be think about the one thing that you have wanted to do or that interests you but you haven't been able to go all in on and then list out the reasons why you haven't and actually measure the potential downsides. Right. So as we talked about earlier, I think a lot of people say like, oh, I can't fail or if I take a risk and do this and it doesn't work, I'm so fucked. And the truth is like you probably aren't. But I think it takes like actually the exercise of writing out what those potential downsides are to visualize like what would happen in that circumstance and realize that it may not be as big of a risk that you think it is.

Very well said. Very true. You can find this man at dank underscore tweets on Twitter beehive.com anywhere else we should send people to connect with you further.

Those are the big tail.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Tyler.

Cool. Appreciate you having me on.