Ep. 85: Why beehiiv is betting big on the "content economy" ft. Tyler Denk

If you are a creator, you're a business owner, you are creating content for a living. We really want to be the tools and infrastructure that allows you to build and launch your business and grow faster and make more money.

The game becomes not just to have like the best newsletter platform, it's more moving towards this, like, operating system. For the creator economy. Right. Or for the.

For the content economy. Right.

Do you think this is something that you want to move towards more generally?

Me as a content creator, I want to spend time creating content. Simplicity and ease of use is very important. We are the tools, we are the infrastructure. You come onto Beehive, you launch a website, you launch your newsletter, you sell digital products. We want to be in the back just supporting.

To me, like, that's what the content economy is, is an acknowledgment of like all of these things collapsing.

If I were to sum up, what do creators or anyone in the content economy really care about? I think there's two things. It's to grow faster and to make more money.

Yeah.

If you can help your users or our creators do those things, I think that's like the key to success.

You acquired a newsletter at one point, right? That was part of your growth.

Really did your research. I didn't even think I publicized that I acquired this newsletter.

You did. You definitely did.

Yeah. Been confronted about it.

Welcome back to the Creator Spotlight podcast. My name is Francis Zier and for the first time today we are recording in person with Tyler Dank, the CEO and co founder of Beehive and also, full disclosure, my boss, which is how I was able to convince him to give me budget to record in person. So if you enjoy this in person recording DM, Tyler, leave comments on those LinkedIn posts and maybe we'll get to record more of these in person.

Yeah. What's funny is I actually never got that budget request. I think you just booked it, so.

Hopefully I did just book it. You know, that's the trust you give me. And so I appreciate that as we record. Beyve's winter release event is still a mystery, but this comes out about four or five days after it's released. What are the highlights?

What are the takeaways of the winter release event? Should we tell the people what the winter release event is?

Should tell them. We should tell them what was in it.

So. Oh yes, we will definitely do that. I'd even take a step back and if you live under a rock or are unfamiliar with our marketing schemes from the past month, if you haven't read your LinkedIn, my LinkedIn bio, my title, my Twitter title, everything. Yeah. The winter release event. What Beehive has been known for over the years is that we ship product very quickly.

Yeah.

And so me and I think we'll get to this as well around my own newsletter, like, half of the company, yourself included, like, has a newsletter on the platform. We're constantly in touch with our users from Twitter and LinkedIn. And, like, I think we're as in touch with, like, our end user as anyone. And that allows us to get feedback constantly and then consistently understand, like, if we launch this, that solves these problems. If we launch this, that helps these people. And so we've been in this motion from day one, which is almost four years to the day, that we just ship features as quickly as possible and we'll announce these in like a weekly email roundup. And after a while, it kind of got a little tiring of, like, you know, that's just like another email dump. It's like a 40% open rate. Some people click it is whatever. And looking at the product pipeline, I was like, wait, we have like three to four, like, very tent pole features that are market expanding, very exciting, very flashy. And rather than dripping them out as like the same old, same old, what if we were to do a live event that is streaming of us announcing these features and making, like a bigger spectacle of what this is? So, like the Apple keynote, it's like the classic example, but a lot of other companies have started to adopt that. And so what went from me thinking I was going to create a slide deck and have like, my surfboard in the background and just like, read through it on your Google map. In my home, in my bedroom.

Yeah.

And just like kind of go through slides presenting these features and like a Google hangout. One thing led to another. I was going to be in New York, and then Most of the PMs that were working on these projects were also in New York. And I was like, let's just record this thing live and like, actually get like a live shot of us going up on stage and doing like an Apple Keynote thing. So that's the evolution of the winter release event. And if you're watching this and you missed it, go check it out. I don't know what the link is, but it'll.

It'll be in the show notes, like.

What the link where we put everything is. Yeah, but what we, what we launched earlier this week or last week, when you watch this is a bunch of things, honestly. So the big market Expansion thing for us is Digital products.

Yeah.

And so we have. And if you are unfamiliar with Beehive, we do newsletters best in class better than anyone. We have a website builder. I think we can compete in the website space by bundling web and email very tightly. We also have paid subscriptions. We also have an ad network to help you monetize. So when you add it all up, if you are a creator, you're a business owner, you are creating content for a living, whether you're a publisher, an independent content creator. We really want to be the tools and infrastructure that allows you to build and launch your business and grow faster and make more money. And we already have a lot of those pieces. So the next evolution of that was digital products, which could be everything from you have notion templates that you want to sell or you want to book time, which is really interesting. So a lot of people offer like interviews or 30 minutes of their time to connect with their fans for 50 bucks or whatever it is. Or if you're a fitness coach, maybe you meet with someone and you charge them $100 to do like a fitness analysis and like coaching session type of thing. So digital products is like the first thing. I think it's a natural evolution of serving the creator and what we call the content economy, which we'll get to. And like how do you monetize your value and your expertise? I don't know if you want me to run through all of the things that we're saying.

I think well, real quick though, I do want to stop on like the fact that like digital products is this net new thing. Right. Because when I first joined the company, people would ask me what I would do and I would kind of jokingly say like I write a newsletter for a company that makes newsletter software. And then after a while like this year I guess I would say like, oh like I work, I'm like a journalist in house at this company that makes newsletter software, website software and has an ad network. Right. And so that Digital products is like this net new thing. And I think to me it's like the company is going from obviously went from websites already to these two other things. But it's like the game becomes not just to have like the best in class newsletter platform but like it's more moving towards this like operating system for the creator economy. Right.

Or for the, for the content economy. Right. And you see that through line. Honestly where I went back to like introducing beyond like what we're known from, it comes from a place of we know Our users so well and when they're in my DMs being like, hey, like this software is great, I love it. For the newsletter I have my website hosted on you guys. But I'm using X platform to sell digital products or I have to integrate this third party platform to like do this booking and whatever. Now I have multiple logins. I'm like signing into different places. I have two different wallets. It's like hard to like connect all these different pieces. So an understanding that these like data points that we get of our users being like, I'd love if I can do all of this right in Beehive.

Yeah.

Well that's like the market signal of like I think there's a real opportunity there. So digital products where we're very excited about.

Yeah, this reminds me, I once interviewed another tech CEO who has a digital products company and they had this story about scaling very quickly. The first year was like, you know, a little. I forget the exact rate, but I think it was the second year they like doubled up to like 30 million very quickly and then they kind of stalled a bit. And for the first time I thought about this fact that like, or this idea that a challenge for any tech company. Building the creator economy, right, is, is the education gap where like you might saturate at one point the market of like educated people, like with Beehive for example, who are knowledgeable enough about growth and about like web design to where they know how to grow an email list and like they know how to invest in meta ads to do that and they know how to make all the decisions you have to make to make like a good looking website with the Beehive product. Right. And then after a certain point though like there's a pretty big education gap to, to grow your market. Right. So I think there's two to me it's like for Beehive to reach that large scale success, like yes, you have to expand the product portfolio, add digital products. But it's also like that to me is a major challenge. Right? Like how do you, how do you help people figure out how to design and sell digital products? Right?

Yeah. And I think we need to get better at like the outcome based marketing where I think we're really good at saying we just launched this feature.

Yeah.

And people are like cool again if unless they asked for it, they're like, I don't really know what this does. Or like you leave it to their imagination of what does that actually mean for me and like how can I use this? Like new feature that you hyped up to benefit like my livelihood or my business.

Yeah.

The evolution of that is like now with Beehive you can, you can charge your fans directly to book time with you bundle that into an email product so you're constantly contacting your fans. Or you could sell a digital product for cheap and understand who those high intent fans are who are interested in willingness to pay that you can then cross sell into different like higher ticket items.

Yeah.

And our platform allows you to do all of that. And so like once you position as that it's everyone who's thinking about like whether they have a high ticket item that they're selling or digital products or an expertise with like a rabid fan base, you're kind of telling them that we have the tools to support you because you've kind of given them the playbook or you're inspiring net new things or plays for them to kind of run by creating marketing that's more outcome based. I think we fall into the trap of like new shiny feature. This is available today and like people are busy. Like everyone has their own thing. Like it's top of mind for us but it's not top of mind for like our users that we're emailing.

Yeah.

And so like really spelling out like what this unlocks for them to do I think is like an evolution of product market that hopefully we do with the winter release event and continue to push on.

Yeah. I mean going back to what we were talking about about the winter release event earlier and like this being like a moment of like oh, instead of dripping these out kind of like every week we'll release digital products, we'll release the podcast feature. Right. Like all these things. Do you think this is something that you want to move towards more generally? Like I've, I mean my, my role now is not so much a marketing role but in the past I've been part of these big releases and it's like oh great, we're going to do this thing in three months. And you kind of like over promise externally and then like people internally get so rallied up and it's like this organizing forcing function for the whole company of like everybody from marketing to engineering is like coming together to work on this one thing and it's high stress and you're like working too much and it's like you can only really do this maybe twice a year, maybe once a quarter at most because people get burnt out and like the novelty kind of disappears for the audience, for the customers. Right. But yeah, I guess I don't know. How do you feel about this as opposed to like the typical just like weekly release, release release cycle.

Well right now because it hasn't happened. This is like us in the future. Like I hope it went extremely well and like people love it. Like the reception was great. We didn't over promise and under deliver.

Yeah.

And that it's something that like we can actually celebrate as like a huge win and like our users and the broader market is like that was like again my initial idea was to stream this live on a Google hangout with a slide deck in my room.

Yeah.

And I think that's like maybe what some people are expecting like no one knows like what we're a small scrappy series startup. I think once they see the production value of what we put on, I'm hoping that it actually is like a larger than life. Like we're punching above our weight. I don't know. I don't think we're just going to. The constant drip of constantly releasing features kind of gives and is the perception of oh they're always looking to make their platform better which is kind of the reputation we've had. So I see both sides of it. I think we'll go back to constantly releasing features and dripping them out as they become available. Because the downside of this big event is two of these features are actually available today. They're qa, they're ready to go. We're actually like withholding them for this like big announcement. And I'm someone who like am much more product. Like get into the market, let your users play with it. You get feedback and you make it so much better. And like we only built those features because people had already been asking for them. So we're kind of like we already have their solution they've been asking for but like we're withholding it for like three to four weeks.

Yeah.

But I do what you said and it's something I think is like you can tell me as an employee at the company, like one of I think my superpowers as a founder is like finding like that rallying cry that can actually get everyone kind of rowing in the same direction. We're 110 people totally remote across the world. So we don't have the touch points at the water cooler. So it's like I'm very intentional of the psyche of the company and what is this big shiny North Star that we can all row in that direction. And I think being like we're going to drop 10 massive features, they're all ambitious individually. We're going to do a huge production thing. We're doing a marketing thing. Customer support's involved, sales is involved, marketing and growth. So I think that's like really fun and it gives something people to like wake up and look forward to.

Even I'm involved. That's why we're doing this.

No, exactly. Right. So like it goes all the way down. And so, yeah, I think there's value to both of them. But no, I don't think this is going to be like a monthly thing for us.

Yeah, definitely a monthly thing. Okay, I'll. This will make sense in a second. Bear with me. You know, I've had people ask me like, or I've also seen people on Twitter say like, why do people say a substack but not a beehive, right? And like, to me the very obvious example is substack is so templatized, right? It's like it's. You can customize more nowadays, I think, but it's still like it's going to look basically the same. The format of the email is going to look basically the same. Your, your webpage is going to look basically the same. Right? And so it's very easy to know what a substack is. It's also the written style is usually kind of this bloggy column. I'm, I'm, you know, definitely reducing a lot, but that's basically true. And then with a beehive, that's not really true because you could have some, you know, Arnold, Arnold Schwarzenegger, big customer on the platform, you could have a creator spotlight. You can have a Ryan Roderick garbage day. There's all these different people producing different styles of content with also different looking newsletters and websites. So I think long term, I mean, I don't know, as a marketing tool, it's great for substack that they have like this Kleenex, right? But I think for creators, it's much better to not be attached to that thing. Not to get too, you know, deep into the bias here. But all that being said, I mean, with introducing digital products and like widening the range of like what a beehive could be, I think there's probably like a few different versions of like, what is a beehive? But I wonder what you think a beehive is.

Well, it kind of brings me back to like one of my favorite analogies is the Amazon vs Shopify analogy, right? And so to give everyone context, like Amazon is the destination. You go to the Amazon.com website, you go to their app, you buy things. Like rarely do I know what brand I'm actually buying from on Amazon. I'm just like typing in toilet paper. Fine. Toilet paper couldn't care less. Like, like whatever the brand is. Right.

10 bucks. Great.

Yeah. And then it shows up in an Amazon box. If you have any problem, any problems whatsoever, you contact like Amazon customer support. So like they're there for distribution. But Amazon is the brand through and through Shopify. And Amazon has millions of third party affiliates. But like it's Amazon who you go to. You don't go to the third party affiliates. Shopify, you go to websites all the time to purchase from them. You have no idea that they're even built on Shopify. It's purely the tools and infrastructure to actually make online commerce possible for all of these different businesses and put their brand first, their distribution. And there's trade offs. Like you have to do your own customer support, you have to kind of set up your own templates, but there's a lot more customization there and you kind of own the audience or your customer end to end. And I think that analogy is very, very similar to like the, the Beehive versus Substack. Like Substack has a reader destination, they have a mobile app that they push your readers into the desk. They are cross posting all the time. So I follow your content on Substack and other similar content is constantly popping up because they are moving into more of a social app. And so where distribution feels like a sugar high for creators because you're getting this like new channel of distribution kind of like the early days of Twitter. You're also giving up your brand, your, your distribution, the control of the audience and like your reader experience. And like that's like the complete opposite direction that I want to go in. Yeah, so we don't say launch a Beehive. Like we are literally that. We are Shopify.

Yeah.

We are the tools, we are the infrastructure. You come on to Beehive, you launch a website, you launch your newsletter, you sell digital products. We'll talk about some of the other features we're launching for the winter release event. But like we don't want to be known. Like we want to be in the back just supporting. I think it's more creator friendly. I think you'd see that in like the business model as well. So we don't take a cut of subscription revenue like Substack does and other creator platforms. So I think there's like a very consistent ethos through and through of we don't want our brand front and center. We don't want to take your revenue. We want to give you the tools where you can build your own successful business and own your customer and end totally.

Okay. Going back to the winter release event and the features release, when I, I was looking at the list, what stands out to me is that this is really like a website product swing. Right. So for the web product there's digital products, podcasts, AI website builder improvements, website templates, web analytics. That's a lot for the web product. And then for the email product there's overhauled automations, dynamic content and an overhauled paid subscription feature. Right. It started as newsletters and then we bought Type Dream and introduce this much better website tool than we had before. And then the ad network came before that as well. But I guess why were website and ad builder the correct bets to take after newsletter and like now maybe the next bet is digital products. Why is that? The order of bet?

Yeah, the order of bet. Yeah. I think that for us like the website to me is like the front door to the rest of the creator economy. You kind of have to have like a like web presence and whether it is the smallest thing you can do which is a link in bio which you missed on the list. We did, we did launched a link in bio offering as well.

He's going to dock myself for that.

Yeah. So that's, that's like very top of funnel. Right. Like almost every creator who has like a YouTube or an Instagram or TikTok and has like multiple places to send their traffic, like link in bio there. There's quite a few large companies in that space. Yeah. And it's because it is very utilitarian for like these different creators.

Linktree is like a very large or I mean multi dozens of millions of dollars business. Right?

Yeah. And like I don't think we're like we're not trying to be a link and buyer tool. Like I don't think we're trying to actually compete with linktree at all. It's more so just like I think it's an add on feature of our overall offering than like a standalone product. Like we're not like a link in a link in bio tool.

Yeah.

So yeah, I think that like to me the website unlocked one link in bio like I said. Digital products, the AI website builder I think is like extremely exciting. You've obviously seen the companies that have launched in the AI space like their revenue, their traction, I think lowering the barriers of entry to create really Beautiful websites where you like way back when it was like you hire, you teach yourself, which is like untenable for most people. Or you hire a web developer, expensive. You go to like a custom shop and then like there was like brands that came along. Whether it's like wix and Squarespace where there's like templates and you can get there, but like there's still templates and they're still drag and drop and like, there's a lot of like customization you have to do where I just like totally blew, like blew that out of the water. Where you could be like, give me a page that looks like this, make it my colors, my font, my like theming and like that becomes possible and you can prompt with like plain English to bring these like different experiences to life. So I think again, bringing the barriers down for anyone to have like something they're proud of is like a big focus of ours. Um, so that's the AI website builder. Web analytics is like, again, it's kind of like just looking at like what is the old paradigm of things. Yeah, previously you set up Google Analytics, you. Most people don't. That's the other thing. Most people just don't set up Google Analytics. And like they would get a lot of value out of taking the time to set it up. But it's like another platform. It's a pixel, it doesn't fire all the time.

This is the education barrier.

100%.

Yeah.

Or like my thesis when I started Beehive was like, hey look, you could have a website on WordPress and you can copy and paste your content into Mailchimp. And then if you wanted ads, you can use like these banner ads and like Live Intent, you can use like third party web analytics. With Google Analytics you could use a referral program and that's like another third party. You can use Stripe and like start doing like a membership business. And I just named like six different tools and like as like the content creator with like 2000 readers who just wants to get off the ground. They're like, where do I even start? And like, I don't know how to do this. Like, I'm not technical, I would never do it myself. Right, you just wouldn't. So it's either like a total barrier to entry of like, I'm just not going to get started on my content like creator journey because it's not worth the struggle to be able to get there, or it's, I'm going to try, it's. I'm going to get frustrated along the way or like me as a content creator, I want to spend time creating content, not configuring Google Analytics and like the pixel and like double and like qaing that it's firing properly. So like roundabout way of getting to your question is really just like to me, the website is the front door to the rest of what we can do in this creator economy. And I think the, the other thing that I've learned with a lot of these content creators is simplicity and ease of use is very important. And the more third party platforms you have to like integrate, the more complicated it gets and the less time you're spending actually creating content. And so the more that we can bundle and like what I think our competence is like product excellence and we can just bring product excellence to all of these different creator tools, bundle them in one solution. I think the all in one, if done well, is a very compelling offering.

Yeah, I mean like the way I tend to define creator, somebody who is creating digital media for distribution on digital platforms, they are somehow growing an audience for that media and then they're somehow monetizing it. Right. And I mean what you're describing there is like productizing the growth and monetization aspects through the website, which is like giving then time for the creator to focus on creating. Which brings me to my next question about the content economy. You've been using this term more internally as opposed to the creator economy. We were talking about Brian Morrissey rebooting right before we started recording. He, I think calls this the information space. I think it's kind of the same thing as the content economy. Tell me, tell me about this term and why you're using it.

Well, we're, we're trademarking that for sure. Or like in the process of trademarking it. I've like never heard it referred to previously and I don't know where it came from. But like we've been constantly trying since we started the company. It's always been very difficult to describe what we do because it started off as newsletter platform. But then when you bundle in like ad network and website and link in bio and digital products, it's like you're actually a lot more than that. Mm. And then the other thing we've always struggled with is who's like our classic like startup term, like who's our icp? Like who are we actually building for? And when you look at our customers, not only do we have such a wide range of customers, we have a wide range of customers who are having tremendous success. So like Arnold Schwarzenegger sends, has a million subscribers on his newsletter, sends out daily Time like Time magazine, the Ringer.

Creator Spotlight, myself, Brian Broderick, garbage day independent journalist.

Now has Oliver Darcy, independent journalist. So like there, none of those people have anything in common with each other, right? Outside the fact that they create content.

They write, send emails to for a living.

So there's, there was a time when we would lean into creator economy. And then our head of sales is like, hey, I'm talking to like Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Banner, like Time, the Ringer. Like they are not creators. They don't refer to creator economy. Like when I say the word creator, like they're like, is this tool even for me? I was like, that's a fair point. Your job is to do enterprise sales. And the thing is like we serve those customers extremely well. So we don't want to isolate them in like our marketing and language. Inversely, if we go all the way into like, hey, we're building for like publishers and whatever else, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kyle Kuzma, like Russell Westbrook, they're like, I'm not like a publisher, right? And so like what's like the unifying thing that is underlying all of these? And like content economy is like kind of where we landed of a bit more abstract, but some purpose of their content or their, of their business or themselves is just creating some sort of content. Primarily text based and email today. But you mentioned we're launching podcasts as well. Sneak peek in 2026. Like video's definitely on the roadmap so you can see like this multimedia thing evolving over time.

Yeah, I mean I, at a previous job, I always, I still give credit to my, my old boss who, who told me this, he was like. Cause I was in marketing, right? And he was like, francis, we're not competing with other companies like ours. We're competing with anything you can look at on your phone, right? Which I think for a while I've applied that to the creator economy. But I think the content economy is more accurate because whether you're like, if you're scrolling Instagram reels, right, I might be seeing something that my friend made, something that some creator I follow made. Something that is an ad from a brand, something that is kind of an ad, but kind of like entertainment from a creator working with a brand, right? And it's like, does it matter where it came from? When it's all like when I'm looking at it all just like scrolling my thumb on the same screen, right? So I think to me like, that's what the content economy is, is an acknowledgement of like all of these things collapsing where, like even in your. In your inbox. Right. It's like, I might be seeing an email from you. I might be seeing like 20 newsletters that I subscribed to coming in today. I might be seeing like a notification that Natalia has like added a comment to some piece we're working on in the Beehive editor. It's like it's all coming from different places and for different purposes, but it's all coming to me in the same screen. Right.

I love the product placement there too. When you get email, when someone comments and edits your doc. Because we do have live collaboration in the editor.

It is very good. Yeah. Okay, going back to pre winter release event, besides any of the features that have just now come out as this is released, what do you think was the most impactful? Not even necessarily like, flashiest feature this earlier this year, but, like, what do you think was the most impactful release on the business?

Yeah, great question. I want to say website, but we just spent so much time talking about website. Yeah. So I'll go the other big bet that I think you hinted at earlier, which is the ad network.

Yeah.

For me, like, my. If I were to sum up, what do creators or anyone in the content economy really care about? I think there's two things. It's to grow faster and to make more money.

Yeah.

And if you can do. If you can help your users or our creators or publishers do those things, I think that's like the key to success. Which is why, like, our initial wedge when we launched four years ago was the Morning Brew referral program. Works so well for Morning Brew. Everyone wanted it. That's like a lot of like, the idea came from people just DMing me constantly, like, how did you build the Morning Brew referral program?

Your claim to fame?

And it literally was my first claim to fame. And I was like, you know what, we're just going to make that default on the product. So if you sign up for Beehive, you have the Morning Brew referral program.

Yeah.

Admittedly, the referral programs, because of that exact reason has become like, there's only so many referrals that you can do. So I think it's become a bit more saturated.

But, like, that's why we keep releasing new features.

Exactly. And so like, but that was like, our DNA from day one is like, what's our wedge into the market is like, oh, like, yes, mailchimp. You can send an email and an email is an email. But does mailchimp actually help you grow any faster? And the answer is no, as do all of these, like, email platforms. They help you send emails. And so not only do we offer the website, so we're giving you more and helping consolidate your tech stack, but we help you grow faster. And we have, whether it's the referrals, recommendation, network boost, like a lot of things to help you grow faster. And then monetize is the second piece of that. And Morning Brew, when I left, we were doing like 20, 25 million in revenue and we had like 20 people on the sales team. And so I saw this engine of like, okay, it's Amazing, we're doing 20 million in revenue, but we have like a full staff of people that are like pitching agencies, pitching brands, doing copywriting, doing reporting, invoicing, managing advertiser relationships. Your average content creator who's writing about sports like three times a week, they don't. Yes, like, Nike would be an amazing advertiser for them, but they're one, busy writing about sports and they have no business like negotiating with Nike or like, they don't know any contacts there. So if we, because we send 3 billion emails a month, can aggregate demand from advertisers and we work with Nike and Netflix and HubSpot and Roku, can we bring those ad opportunities to these content creators? So they wake up, they're like, oh, I have a Nike ad that's paying me $10 CPM, so I have to do nothing. I add this ad that adds legitimacy to my business. I have a big Nike logo in it. It's good copy. I know my audience is engaged because one, Beehive knows with all of our first party data, like, we serve ads that we think will perform best. And two, you know, as a content creator that writes about sports, Nike would be a great advertiser. And then a few weeks later, you get deposited into your wallet, like 500, 5,000, whatever, depending on the size of your list. Like, that's great. And so, like, I mean, it's not totally novel. Like, YouTube invented this, right? Or like pioneered the. You focus on creating content. We will help bring advertisements. And so while YouTube is like, lack of control, for the most part, like, it's just, they'll monetize your video and you get money. It's great. It's hands off. We're a bit more hands on where you actually get to see the advertising options and choose which one you want to run. But yeah, I mean, I think we've made considerable strides on the ad network this year. I think we're still liking the first inning of what this ad network can be. I think that's like one of our big like multibillion dollar bets.

Not to, well, not to get too ahead of the skis, but what's like the second inning, third inning of what the ad network looks like?

Well part of it's just like time in market and scaling. So like the ad network, we're constantly in a supply and demand market where we either don't have enough publishers, we have too much advertiser demand, or we grow really quickly and we publishers are complaining, hey, we need more ads. So like there's constantly just like over time getting more publishers and more advertisers and the more publishers we have, the big numbers attract larger and larger advertisers which then gets publishers more excited to come onto the platform. We so like to get ahead a bit. Like right now the way that it operates is every Sunday you get your like slew of like here's the five ads that you have for this week and you can accept them, you can decline them, but you have to like kind of schedule them. We're moving into a world where it's like real time ads where you can say as you're writing your newsletter, give me an ad. It'll give you like the top 10 recommendations for your newsletter specifically and you can choose them on demand rather than having like schedule in advance. So a lot more control, a lot more optionality from there. I think like AI could play a part in this. So like if we have your entire content library, we know how Francis writes Creator Spotlight rather than the Nike ad. In Creator Spotlight being the same as every other Nike ad, can this one be in your voice and tone based on all of your content which in theory would increase like the engagement, the click through rate and then also how much you're getting paid. So there's like a few of the different things we're talking about but I think from abrupt, not from the creator lens but from the advertiser lens. Most advertisers go to Meta and Google like the duopoly of digital advertising and those like on platform algorithmic feeds super twitchy. Like there's a lot going on well in the meta case and Google just runs the world. But like if we could be the third there like the first deck I ever made, like very ambitious of me have the first beehive deck I ever made for a seed is like our competitors one day will be Meta and Google Because I want a brand marketer to be like, we need new customers. We're AG1 and we want new wellness focused. I'm just giving a bunch of shout outs in this friend free advertising. But they are an advertiser. So shout out. If you're an advertiser, you get, you get shout out.

Like an Ag one.

Yeah, you get shout outs on the pod. If you're AG1, you're like, hey, we need more like health conscious customers or whatever. Like, you're already maxed out on meta. You're spending a ton. You're spending a ton on Google. Like, can be high. Be that third platform where you're like, we know that there are so many health conscious readers and newsletters and content being created and right now there's not a way, if you're 81 to go to. Well, you could, you could mainly reach out to hundreds of these newsletters and negotiate.

But that's so like, that's so resource.

Never going to work well.

Okay, so another thing, does it become, does the marketplace become more like tiered? Like, is there like, like whether for the advertiser? I guess it would be both for the advertiser and the publisher. Do there become like menus of like, here's like, you know, you go to restaurants, like, here's the cheaper wine, here's the more expensive wine.

Yeah, I mean we're definitely like going to get more sophisticated with like all of our targeting and optionality. The other thing that we actually started tossing out, which is pretty interesting, so really very forward and transparent with our roadmap. But like with the launch of digital products, like, how cool would it be if you launch a digital product on Beehive and be like, I want, like it's selling but I want thousands of customers. Can this be an ad immediately?

Plug it in.

So like now we have distribution baked in. So you launch a digital product on Beehive, say it's like a notion template and you want like work. I don't even like work efficient.

Like, I mean, I've interviewed for example, like one that we have on the. I don't know if it's on the platform right now, but I interviewed Nicholas Cole from Ship 30 for 30 and premium ghostwriting Academy earlier this week and I know that they have had, I think both of those products in the ad network. Maybe just ship 30 for 30. Like that's the digital product that has been on the network.

Yeah. So could you launch a digital product on Beehive? You push your audience to it with your Own distribution. You're like, oh, that's great. It's selling. Could you make that an affiliate offer? That then flips to the Beehive ad network. So if you, Francis, launch like a notion template for how you write. Like, you're writing notion template for how you create Creator Spotlight, and you have these 400,000 people in your email list. Like, if you ever wondered how I create content on like a weekly basis, here's my template. It's $5.

Yeah.

And you're like, oh, there's like a lot of demand for that. But I only have my 400,000 people in my audience. Only 400. Where do I go from here? Well, if you could be like, I'd like to target anyone else that creates content in the Beehive ecosystem around creators. Then as a creator, I log in to write my newsletter and if I want to monetize it, I could see an ad from Francis, be like, if I promote this Creator Spotlight template, I'll get paid $3 or whatever it is. So I think that distribution aspect is really interesting. And that's like, where the bundling comes in, where I really think we're at the first inning of we did the hard part first. I think email is incredibly hard. And I think as we add more and more products, you can see how a digital product on, like, these other platforms, you're kind of living in, like, isolation, where with us, you flip the 3 billion impressions and you can get a lot of distribution, which is like a really unique competitive advantage.

Yeah, I think. I mean, this goes back to, like, this portfolio operating system for the creator economy, right. Where it's like, you're not necessarily forced to use any of these things. You can just have, like, the email product, but those other things are available and, like, synergistic. With the email product, you said only 400,000 subscribers. With Bigdesk Energy, your newsletter, this today, as we record, you hit only 120,000 subscribers. You do this both, I think, because you like it, you're a good writer, and it's dogfooding. Right. You're using the tool so you understand the customer better. How did you hit 120,000 subscribers? Was it like a mix of meta ads, boosts, and just organic?

A lot of organics. Like, I didn't put any money into it for, like, the first 20, 25K subscribers. And, like, we'll talk the book, like, a lot of Beehive native features. Right. So every piece of content that I write has an email gate on it. So in order to read it, you have to put in your email. And so I'll promote it on X, I'll promote it on LinkedIn, I'll promote it on like whatever other channel it gets people's interest. They click on it, they have to put in their email. So like that's not like a silver bullet, but like it adds to like a few dozen subscriptions every time I do it. I do have a referral program that works like decently well. I connected to like drop shipping and like digital goods. I have a lot of lead magnets as well. So I'm very transparent about like this whole building in public Persona. And so I built or like the deck that I built for our seed round and our series A and our series B. Like if you're interested in that. So you're a founder again. It all comes back to understanding who your audience is. For me, my audience is like founders. And so like what do founders actually want? Like, if I'm thinking about leaving my job and starting a business, how do I raise money? As like a seed round is very interesting to me. So if Tyler shares me talking in third person shares, like this lead magnet to put in my email and I get the actual C deck.

Yeah.

Unedited, totally raw. That like he raised two and a half million dollars for. That's interesting. So like lead magnets work a lot.

You've got your. The investor updates. 1 Right. Where it's like, I think it's on a, on a two year delayed.

Yeah. Just because I started it later. But yeah. So I sent. Ever since we launched the business, I've sent a monthly investor update and it ended up just being like. And it like one day, maybe it's a book, I don't know. But like it's this really like beautiful and like vulnerable journey of like every month of like, oh, shit, this is, this is a rocket ship.

You're a very unmediated guy.

Yeah.

You lay it out there and so.

It'S like, this is a rocket ship. This is amazing to. Holy shit. Like that, that sucks. Like, but it's the entire journey with the numbers and like, so I had all this content, I was like, again, what would a founder be interested in? Like, I think the investor updates are incredibly helpful. So one of my lead magnets is you put in your email and every month you get a investor update for me as if you invested at the very beginning and you kind of follow the journey unfold. So I think that's like really like creative and differentiated type of like lead magnet. Yeah, Recommendation Network works great. I think I have like four or five hundred different publishers promoting Big Desk Energy, which is, which is one of them. Thank you. What else do we have? The Boost Network. I put a little bit of money into Boost and then there is a point with like, like with newsletters where like you have to invest into paid, whether that's like Meta or Google. And so I've done a little bit of all of that.

And yeah, I think, I mean going back to my question of like what is a Beehive again? I think there's a lot like there is the larger publisher using it. There's like the famous person very well known. You listed a few of those. And then like what you're doing though is sort of the individual creator version of what is a Beehive, which is to say like you are using all of these different features in different ways. You are also like, you're not a paid subscription product. You are monetized through ads, which I, whenever I've like describe people. If somebody asked me about like a beehive versus a substack versus a mailchimp or whatever, right? I'm like, the, the DNA you have to understand of Beehive is that it comes from you working at this company that was a, an advertising based company, right? So it's like the DNA of Beehive comes from you building that and then coming here. And like a Beehive then is there might be a paid subscription option, but it's going to be monetized through ads. There's going to be lead magnets because it like there is this sophistication about growth, about monetization, about like turning this thing into kind of a working business. So I think, I mean that's kind of the point of you doing it too is to like have this like prime example of here is a thing you could build on Beehive. You acquired a newsletter at one point, right? That was part of your growth. What I don't know like how many subscribers you had when you did that. But I'm also curious of like how you integrated that because I've, you know, I've talked to a few people on the POD who've acquired other newsletters or been acquired. And I know that it like, like it's a little, I don't know if tricky, but there's like some measures you have to take in like integrating those lists and making sure people don't like mass and subscribe. And then your investment was kind of worthless. Tell me about that acquisition yeah, you.

Really did your research when I didn't even. I didn't even think I publicized that I acquired this newsletter.

You did. You definitely did.

Oh, did I?

Yeah.

Okay.

I mean, if you did, we could, we could.

No, no, it's all good. I would just have. Yeah.

I've never been confused.

Fronted about it.

Yeah.

I think I was at like 20,000 subscribers and it was like pretty early on and it was more of like someone who was building in like kind of a similar space being like, hey, like, I have this list of 5,000 subscribers. Like, it's really engaged. My work's busy. Like, there's a lot going on. Like, I just don't think I'm going to carry this on. Love your content. Would you want to buy it? You kind of figure out like a price per like subscriber.

Yeah.

Again, it wasn't like a ton of money, nor was it like a ton of subscribers. But, like, if I was already open the door to like, I'll pay $2 per subscriber on Meta, like, what would I Pay to get 5,000 somewhat engaged subscribers? There's obviously like a discount there of like, to your point, not everyone's going to opt in, not everyone's going to convert. Some people are going to miss the announcement that like, you're now subscribed to this other thing and be like, what the hell is this? And like Mark is spam.

Yeah.

So there's not like an exact science to it, but like the traditional playbook. If I was going to put on like my email deliverability hat here. Well, one, the acquisition. Two, I think best practice would be in the old list. Within the old email. You announce like, hey, like, this newsletter has been acquired by X and you will now start receiving big desk energy every Tuesday. And then you add like some hype. It's written by Tyler, he's a co founder of the company. Like, my newsletter was on this platform. I think you'll personally like love this.

We did this a bit when I started writing Creator Spotlight. We did this whole thing of like, here's a note from Tyler. It's like, I'm the founder of Beehive and. And Francis is doing this thing now, blah, blah, blah. Like, yes, it's still. We rebranded it, but yeah, you want to get out.

I think where people get in trouble is they just like take. They download the CSV, they have 5,000 new emails. They just throw it on their email and like now you have like 1/5 of your list being like, what one, what is this? I never signed up for this. Like you just kind of set yourself. It's like a little scummy as well. It also might be illegal. So there's something around there. Like it's not best practice. So best practice would be like from the old email sender, like full disclosure got acquired. This is what they expect. Hype up the new person, like what they're getting and then what you, what you. Typically there's like an opt in versus opt out thing. One is prefer depends on how like what your risk tolerance is. The most like white hat way to do it would be if you want this newsletter that just got acquired or just acquired us, click this button and we'll automatically add you. Yeah, but you can assume like you click through rates are 1 to 3%. So you bought this whole asset and like 3% of the list actually decided that they want that. So like that's what like our deliverability.

Your cost subscriber has just gone up a lot.

Like that's what like what email deliverability experts would recommend. And it's like definitely the most like above board thing to do is like disclose it and let them say, oh, I signed up for this, it's no longer that. So you have to kind of resubscribe and get consent. Yeah, I'm like a little bit more gray hat in that area. I would be like, hey, if you're like totally out and don't want this new newsletter, click this button and we'll remove you and you'll never hear from us again. Yeah, again like maybe 500 to like a thousand people opt out because like they didn't sign up for that initial newsletter. Totally fine. But everyone else who did not click that button, you just assume they're good. That's consent and you kind of move them over. Yeah, again, I like the scale that I was doing at like 5,000 subscribers. Like it's like pretty low key and fine and I, and like my content's great. So like it's honestly a gift that they would.

Yeah, I, I was listening to another podcast you did recently where you're talking about your routine and you know, you wake up at 5:00am, you, you meditate for 20 minutes, you go to the gym, all this stuff. You unblock people on the east coast because you're on the west coast. I've got the whole spiel down. You go to bed at 9pm the point is like, I think you still, you write everything in the newsletter yourself. It's something that is important to you. You enjoy doing it. You are a good writer. Where does that fit in your priorities? Because I think, like, I've interviewed people like Tommy Clark, former guest of the pod. He runs an agency that a major product there's is helping Executives write for LinkedIn. Right. And they, they'll do some ghost writing. They'll like do some, you know, interview them and turn it into content. But the point is, it's like, it's hard to find time do that. Well, it's so. So it's only more and more competitive, like how good content is on any given platform. Obviously there's the aspect of like, it looks good for you as the CEO of this company to use the product. Right. Where does it sit in your priorities? Like, I imagine you're spending a good amount of hours per week on this.

Yeah. I mean, if Beehive's 99% of my priority, this is like where the last 1% comes in and like everything else about life kind of falls after that, which is not much left over.

Yeah.

Um, no, I mean, I joke that's like the bane of my existence because, like, writing it like, I think I'm an above average writer, but it doesn't come easily. Like, these newsletters take 5 to 10 hours depending on, like, what topic I'm writing about, like, the mood and like, how motivated I am to write and like how important of a piece it is. Is it just like another weekly one or am I getting a bit more aggressive about one or two?

I've given you edits.

Yeah. There's the call on the Big Dog to make sure that we actually have some edits going on in there. Um, so, yeah, I mean, for me, like an ideal workflow is one thing that I've learned is like, I have this running notepad on my Apple Notes. So like, anything that happens in like a meeting, I'm like, oh, I could write a post about that. Like, I have this running list of like, these are interesting topics I think I can expand on.

Yeah.

And sometimes, like, inspiration will strike. I'm like, that's a great. Like, I have a very opinionated stance on this. I think people would enjoy this. And then I put it in that notepad. I'm like, I'll come back to it in a few weeks. And when you come back in a few weeks, you have no inspiration. Like, yeah, that moment passed. Like, you had a lot to say at the time and you're trying to force up those emotions again and it's just not there. And so I have learned that once that inspiration strikes, find your computer as quickly as possible. And even if it's the worst rough draft, which all of my. It'd be funny if I want to do this if share my first draft of something and then share the finished product. It is so unrecognizable for a future.

Issue when you're feeling too lazy.

It is so unrecognizable. My first rip at all of these are terrible. They're bullet point list. There's run on sentences. I end up cutting like 80%. There's no narrative whatsoever. And that's what takes a lot of time. And ideal for me is I have inspiration. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And I spend 30 minutes writing the worst rough draft. But all the thoughts are there. Kind of the ice sculpture that I can carve out later. And then I'll try to take an hour on Friday and I'll just run through it. Here I am on Friday afternoon. I have no idea what I'm writing about next week.

You got four days.

That's where the more that I've realized that I wait like Sunday to start writing like the difference in product. When I actually get the first version out on like a Wednesday and Thursday and I can revisit it five separate days just to check in for 30 minutes and tweak things. The final product is so much better than if I wait till Sunday and I get one read through on Monday and try to cram it in.

Yeah.

So that's like my. I mean the benefit of having a weekly newsletter is like, I only really need one week.

I to that end of like getting down the rough draft. One thing, I haven't done this that many times, but at least like three or four times is I was. I was like stuck on something. I was like, I gotta go get groceries anyways. So I went to the grocery store and then like, I'll just like take out my phone and like talk into voice notes. Like as I'm like, you know, grabbing some beans off the shelf or whatever. I. Yeah, I recommend.

Yeah. Yeah. Getting beans going and going.

Just go somewhere in public, walk around and just talk to yourself or your phone. It really helps. Okay. If this is the bane of your existence, what's the end game? Do you have to kind of just like keep writing this newsletter until beehive is like.

That's why I say I joke that it's a bank because the upside has been incredible. Right. I think one, I've gotten so much.

Closer to the product you also me make money doing.

Yeah. I run ads on it. So like I made money. I have like a founder mastermind thing. So, like I'm knowing that my audience is founders. Like, I've actually hosted these masterminds in Costa Rica.

Yeah.

Where I invite like 10 founders. And one, it's like revenue. Two, it's like an amazing opportunity to like network with people that I want to meet. I've even invested in some of those companies from people that I. That I've met through that.

You've spent money.

Yeah, exactly. So, like, it's been great, the newsletter. I think it's like the perfect case study too of like how valuable putting your thoughts out on the Internet is and actually growing this following of people and like providing value to like this, this cohort of founders.

Yeah.

So it's been incredibly door opening, if that's a noun or adjective.

Newsletters open doors.

Yeah, sure, we'll work here.

Yeah.

It's been so valuable, honestly. And so like, I dread it every before writing it, I dread every second of it. And as soon as I like finally finish it and do my last read through, I. That was fucking awesome.

I mean that's kind of the feeling.

I.

And then like as soon as it goes out, I feel, that was awesome. And then about an hour later I'm like, God, that sucked. That was horrible.

You know, it's. That was awesome. You checked the replies and like, people are like eating it up. You're like, oh, that was like a great piece. Like, people are like, I found so much value in this.

Yeah.

And then like an hour later you're like, what am I going to write about next week?

Exactly, exactly. The high, the high does not last long in like, I don't know, conversations you've had with, with customers recently or like potential customers. What are people asking for and demanding? Like, what's. I mean, maybe this is stuff that we're filling the gap with the winter release. I don't know. But yeah. What are you hearing from customers or potential customers that people really want or need or what are their challenges that they're facing?

Yeah, I think I'd like to think that most of them are being addressed in the winter release. So podcast is a big one, right? I think the overlap of people who are creating content online and have a newsletter and also have a podcast, like, there, there's you. Yeah, exactly. You yourself a great example of that. Like, can we bundle that, Host your podcast, be able to aggregate it and then you bundle that with like a link in bio. And now you have like this full 360 view of you Send people to your link in bio. You can see how many people are clicking and listening to your podcast, but also who's opening and clicking on your emails, who's visiting your website. So I think this like analytics layer with podcasts are like very interesting. In addition to everything else that we're offering, videos come up a lot more and I'm trying to suss like the signal from the noise of like, like we're not going to replace YouTube. We're not trying to be TikTok or Reels. So like where does video fall into our ecosystem? And it's easy for like the hard part about my job is like I hear so many feature requests and complaints every day and it's like, what actually is something we should be doing. And that solves a real problem that I think we're like uniquely positioned versus like it's so easy for like a random user be like, hey, love video, you should have video. And it's like, I don't know, wouldn't you rather just post your video on YouTube?

Because like, I mean the whole reason, I mean we're recording this in person, we got high quality video here. The whole reason we do this is because YouTube has a great distribution engine and originally the podcast was just audio and then we started doing video because YouTube is.

Yeah. And we're seeing like those are the trends that you're kind of seeing.

So.

So Spotify is lean very much into video based like podcasts essentially because like I saw some crazy stat recently which I'm totally going to butcher, so I'll ignore the number. But some large percentage of people actually prefer to watch their podcasts on YouTube, which you've seen. And like for me, like a podcast for me are like while I'm cooking, while I'm driving. So it's like a total, total audio thing.

Shout out to the people watching this though. We love you.

Yeah, yeah, we do love you. But yeah, yeah. So like, and so like Spotify has seen that they've gone very deep on like video podcasts as well. And, and so I think, I don't know, trend like that's also what's really interesting is like consumer trends are constantly changing and so how do we understand how behaviors are changing of how people are consuming content and be on the forefront of like being able to empower users to do more of what they want to do. So videos come up a bunch. I just haven't like exactly squared like where it fits into the platform and why you would rather post on a beehive. Hosted website, your video versus YouTube or TikTok or shorts.

So yeah, I mean, for me personally, I do not currently see a reason I would want a video product native in Beehive. I'm fine with YouTube, but I guess like the reason would be something like Wistia, which I've used in the past in the marketing job. Right. Where it's like you use that instead of YouTube as an embed on your website because it has like really great data of like, you know, when people stopped watching and I don't remember I've used it in a while. But so I guess it's a very specific type of user because we definitely don't. You don't want like, you don't need Beehive to host your video. I don't know, maybe there are like.

Two other ways looking too. I think large publishers, they like to monetize both website and video. And there's like YouTube monetization may not be as favorable if you self host and do your own sort of ads. Or like there's alternatives to video where you can monetize more. And then the other one is if you have a paid subscription offering, and this is something I think Substack's done a pretty good job with is you can actually put, you can paywall your video at a certain point of the video.

Yeah.

So if you have a paid subscription product and want to do some sort of video where, you know, a free reader or a subscriber could get two minutes of the video, but then there's like a hard paywall, like that has been effective for certain content creators.

Well, this is too where Substack isn't like, I mean it's no longer. We don't need to like rehash this a lot, but it's no longer really a newsletter product. Right. It's like Twitter Patreon with a newsletter feature. Yeah.

Right. That's a good way to.

Yeah, I mean like that, what you're describing there is like, is like a Patreon feature of like these, these, these paywalls.

Right.

Like Patreon's maybe the most is like the Kleenex of that kind of thing. Right. So it's like how much do we need to compete on that front versus like going into like the, you know, with a web builder competing with like other web builder tools. Right. Like, I don't know. I don't think that's our arena.

Yeah, no, I agree. And so like it's evolving and like, I'll never say never like another thing that's randomly come up a lot for enterprise users is like sms, which is really interesting to me and like it kind of goes back to like who is our end customer. For me as like a consumer, I hate sms.

Yeah.

Like, I don't give any brands my phone number. I'm inbox zero both in like email, but definitely. And like imessage definitely. Like there was a time where Chipotle had it and they would send me like freak walk text and like I would like that every now and then. But like then even that got annoying because they brands really like the thing that marketers love the promote is like, oh, email has like a 30% open rate but SMS is like a 99% open rate. So yeah, people open it because it's obnoxious to have unread messages. But when Chipotle started texting me two times a day, I'm like, I'm out. Like, I don't, I don't need this.

Well, the first case study I've seen of this from a newsletter I follow. You're familiar with Tangle?

Yep.

Yeah. So I think I forget, I'm going to forget all the details, but about a week or two ago, as we record in one of their emails, they said that they were going to start introducing an SMS service as like a perk for premium subscribers. And I'm pretty sure Isaac Saul, the guy who runs Tangle, I think he framed it as like, this is a way of us getting ahead of like possible future inbox disruption. Right. Which, you know, AI summary, summarizing, whatever newsletter, it's like, oh, you wrote this long thing. Doesn't matter, they're just going to read the summary. I think he framed it as that. It's like an experiment. We'll see. But it's like I wish I could remember exactly what it is. Maybe producer Tom will put an overlay on the screen if you're watching.

But to me that's so interesting because maybe I'm naive but the AI summaries and inbox I don't think are replacing quality content because one, they're not that good and they'll get better for sure. But like an AI summary can only do so much summarizing. Like when I read Creator Spotlight, like I want your full take and analysis, like creator economy, like, and a one sentence summary isn't giving me the value that I need.

Yeah, if, well, if I. To be, to be sure, if I didn't do a good job and I'm just like, you know, it's like 10,000 words when it should have been a hundred words. Like maybe it replaces that. But like the idea is you're, you're like putting care into the product and.

It'S I think like the, the like. So going back to like what made Morning Brew special and then every newsletter wanted to be morning brew for X, for crypto, for AI, for HealthC. Like I think if you're just recapping news like that is where I might be worried of like whether it's an AI summary or just other forms of like news aggregation could disrupt that. Yeah, but if you are following a creator or an expert who has like an actual opinion and take an analysis on something like I love Ben Thompson for like stratachery. Like I read all, it must be like 34000 word emails are so long. Yeah, but like I'm very curious about his take and I respect his opinion and perspective. Perspective.

And it's about spending the time with it, not just like getting the fact and moving on. It's about immersing yourself.

It's like, yeah, sure, I could, I could get an AI summary of what meta's earnings look like and I can get the numbers like, oh, they beat earnings because of this. And like I could read that in 10 seconds. But like Ben has a decade plus of like doing this earnings analysis and understanding the broader ecosystem with like really opinionated takes of like the tech economy essentially. And like that's why I paid 15amonth to read his take. And so like I think the more again, like I'm not, I'm going to put myself in the same category as Ben Thompson. But like my, the content that I'm creating is like the behind the scenes stories of building this company that you really can't get. Like a summary. Like you can't have that.

You have a strong voice in your writing too. Right. And like that's, that that's important to stand out.

And I think so. Like the underlying theme that I'm trying to get at is like, I think if you're worried about like AI summaries disrupting your actual content, like you need to lean more into like what is my unique perspective or a voice that makes people seek me out as a content creator. And I think with AI in general, you'll see more slop and more like more just garbage created. So I think people's willingness to shift back towards like human created content because that person is smart or respectable or entertaining is like where creators are going to shine more in the future. I mean, I think leaning into that is like where you find like more competitive advantage.

Totally. No, I agree. I mean like as the amount of, as the amount of content increases, as the amount of low quality content increases, quality content only increases in value.

Not to say tango tangles very high quality. So like, but, but that's, I mean.

That'S just like they're just taking a protective measure, right? Like, and I think, I think it's going to be like kind of, I don't know if it's going to be summaries of, of what they covered that day or like links out to the thing that they covered that day because.

That sound like worse. Like I'm trying to imagine how I consume iMessage. Right. One, I don't like, I don't, I don't, I don't want content like flooding in like my text messages. Like there's like personal conversations for planning friends or like, or look, I've gotten.

A few like you know, political fundraising texts recently and I just kind of like open it and slide out as.

Fast as possible as much that email gets shit for like the limitations, like you can embed video, like you have to link out and like it's like a, it's an open protocol that's fairly dated, it's been around for a while. Like SMS is more restrictive, right? You can't add like images, you can't inline stuff, you can't style anything. So like maybe sms, which is also an open protocol, like evolves in some capacity. But to me it feels like, I don't know. Again I'm fairly opinionated and for the right type of business SMS is effective for certain things. For the content driven businesses that I think is like our icp. I understand people's curiosity with sms. I personally as a consumer just don't see it. So I'm opinionated.

Well, it's kind of like with really long tweets, right? It's like that classic reaction image like I'm happy for you or sorry that happened, whatever. Like I'm not reading exactly right? Like I don't, I will never read a very long tweet. If you put that in a newsletter or on a webpage, I'll read it. But like I just, that's not the medium for me and it hasn't taken off.

I remember when they first launched I was like this like new like foray into like long form media. Yeah. And I hated it then, I hate it now. Like it's like I think the beauty of Twitter was like in the 280 characters. Like it Makes you a better writer to be able to like, gravity, to be able to actually boil your thoughts down to something into 280 characters that like, can convey information or be entertaining. I think there's like a real skill to that to become a better writer. And I think that was like the beauty if you scrolled through your Twitter feed and every post was like paragraphs long. Like, it sounds terrible.

No, that's, that's why I have like the New York Times app.

Right, Exactly.

As we add all these features to Beehive and it becomes like less just the creator economy and more the content economy. And you've got all these different sizes and business models swimming in the same pool. Right. Like, how do you make sure that all parties are kind of left satisfied with the product?

Yeah, I mean, that was kind of like the initial thesis too is like how what I learned from the Morning Brew days was we were sending 4 million emails every, like an email newsletter to 4 million people.

Yeah.

But the people who were contacting me on like LinkedIn and Twitter being like, hey, what tech are you using? Like, how can I use this like Morning Brew ecosystem? Which was like the impetus for Beehive. They were independent journalists with like 20 like 250 subscribers to hobbyists that were starting like an arts and crafts newsletter for their friends. And it's like the fact that Morning Brew is this massive 4 million email subscriber list, like a full like content production, the same output and design and features were wanted by like these very small content creators. Kind of told me that like the underlying, like everyone wants what like the, the big dogs have. It's like kind of follow the leader. And so like, that's always been my philosophy of like, we're building and like in the democratization of tools that kind of overplayed. But like Morning Brew was all custom built in house. Like, me, Ben and like a few other engineers helped build all of this tech. And that's like, was like the well oiled machine that made everything work. And so most content creators and journalists don't have access to the type of like enterprise tools that we had built in because it took us three years to build it. And so I think always building for like the most advanced use cases and the most enterprise users is like where we're focusing our time knowing that even if you have 10 subscribers, your admiration and like you are inspired by the big players and like, that's who you want to be more.

Like, you build the complexity and you simplify it at the point of the.

Application which is the hard part. Right. Like, we arguably, because we have this, like, rotating, this revolving door features every week, we actually have so much functionality that we're like, in the early days, people would churn because we didn't have this feature and we didn't have this feature. Now people churn because we have too many features. So it's like a product and design problem to be like, how do you understand the complexity or the maturity of this user to be able to show them the right features at the right time in their customer journey. And that's like a whole different challenge.

Yeah. This is reminding me of my personal favorite feature released this year, which was the latest post performance module in the dashboard, part of the dashboard overhaul. Because I track every issue of Creator Spotlight. I have a big spreadsheet with all the metrics that we're interested in, and I record that three days after each send. But what that little module does is it basically allows me to. Instead of having to go in and look at. Okay, looking at these 10, let me highlight these cells. What was the average. What was max? Was the minimum open rate in this period of time? It's like, it's all right there. Right? And I think that's a great example of that, which obviously there's like cues taken from. From other apps. Do you think that was like. I mean, that was. I really like that one.

I love it. It's one of the most, like, widely shared features or like screenshots. Now it's the first thing I do, like Tuesday, I send my newsletter. Like, like 5:00am Pacific Time, go to the gym, come back and like, I'm like, anxiously, like, nervous, like, refresh. It totally changes my mood for the day.

Exactly.

If it's like. So for context, we. We rank your most recent posts relative to the last 10 posts by Open rate. By open rate. So, like, I've had some days where it's 10th out of 10 and that's like, fuck. Like, I just put. That was like one of my best pieces. I put all this time into it. It's like literally performing the worst out of my last 10 posts. Flip side, sometimes I refresh. It's like number one. And you ride that high all day long.

Yeah. Which I get. I mean, open rate, obviously this is something I think about a lot, is like, was the open rate there a function of, like, audio? Like, the audience just got tired of the content recently because it was lower? Or was it just that, like, my subject line was not, you know, hooky enough? Wasn't. Didn't didn't click.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

Is it deliverability? Like, is there something else going on? Yeah, I mean the email's the wild west, which is why I always say it's like, I'm glad we started with like what I think is the hardest thing to do. There's so much between deliverability, security fraud, IP addresses, DNS. Like, there's a lot going on under the hood. Not to discount like these other like creator. But like video is very hard too. I'm sure.

Yeah.

But yeah, no email, emails. It's amazing and it sucks at the same time.

Yeah. Okay, Going back to this, like the Morning brew of X. We were talking about that a second ago, I think at the beginning of Beehive. Obviously that was like your reputation, your pedigree. That was, that was like the one liner pitch. Beehive Build the Morning Brew of xyz. Is that still the pitch or like, what's the new. The new pitch.

Yeah. So when I do, and I brought up ICP quite a few times because like it's very top of mind for us. Like as the winter release event happened.

Just last year, it's like the startup boogeyman.

Yeah. It's just like we've just did like this massive market expansion of who we can serve. And so then you like, again, going back to like our biggest problem of a business when it's Arnold Schwarzenegger and Time and Oliver Darcy and me, it's like, like, who are you actually? Like when you go to like Facebook ad manager, like, who are you actually targeting? Like, who do you want to get in front of? It's a really hard problem when like your answer is like, oh, anyone can use our software. And while that can be true and everyone can use our software at some point as like a growth team, we have to be like, but this is.

Like, I'm not anyone, I'm Francis. This is what I do. Right?

This is our like, segment of like we. There's a big market there. We know we can serve them better than anyone and like we know where to find them. So like that's who we're going after. And the morning brew for X is like when I look at all of our ICPs, like what we actually do own because like I did this whole analysis of like, whether it's an independent journalist, whether it's a big publisher, whether it's like a digital entrepreneur, and then like, what are the tools that they're kind of using today and like how do we enter that picture and the one that was the hardest, like say who else are they using? Is actually like the morning brew for X. Because that was our pitch for a long time.

Yeah.

And so I actually think we not own that space but like that's our core competency.

Yeah.

The thing is when you look at like tam, I don't think that's the biggest of all those because there's only.

So many people who are going to make those businesses and those businesses will only be big enough with you know, so many subscribers that pay so many, so much and beyond fees.

Right. So that's where I think you loop all the way back down to like content economy and like is it this like digital entrepreneur? I created this like new diagram of like the spectrum of like hobbyists to like outcome oriented like digital entrepreneur. And like we skew very much on like to the right side of that where it's not like you're not just writing content for content sake. Like maybe you're an independent journalist, maybe you love writing, maybe it is a hobby for you and we can serve them as well. But I think we want the people who want to grow faster. They're writing content but they also want to monetize it. Do they want paid subscriptions? Do they want ads? Is it top of funnel to drive them into a course or to a digital product? So it's like this outcome based entrepreneur and writer where they're using content as a means to an end, to build a business around it is like kind of like what we're getting at. So a lot of buzzwords there but like, yeah, that's kind of like what it's a work in progress. Right. And I. And truthfully we're recording this before the winter release event. So it's how does that land? What does adoption look like and where do we see like this huge uptick ideally. And adoption of a certain new feature that we launch that we can double down and continue to build. Because again like my core competence, like what I believe our core competency is like we ship product better than anyone else. We are so deep, deep in with the users and understanding their problems and use cases. So if we just continue to double down on that and ship product better than anyone else, I'm like very bullish on the future of the business.

I think we'll end it right there. Tyler.

Cool. Let's get it.

Thank you for. Thank you for coming on. Also listener, if you liked this in person conversation, whether you watched it or whether you're listening to it and you noticed the energy was better, DM me DM Tyler. Tell him I need budget for a full time studio and we'll do more of these.

Thank you very much. Or if you're a listener and whether you're watching or listening, if you sign up for Beehive and purchase a plan, we'll have more revenue to get Francis's studio.

Now. There we go. That was a good plug.

There we go.

All right. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. Cheers. If you enjoyed the episode with Tyler and are looking for something else, I recommend this episode with Adam Biddlecomb. He co founded a newsletter called Mindstream, built it to $30,000 a month in revenue, and then sold it to HubSpot.

All within 17 months.

It's a good episode. Give it a listen.