From Idea to $50,000,000+ Software in 18 Months | Beehiiv - Tyler Denk

How much money is Beehive making right now?

Right now. So this is our 19th or 20th month. We'll make about $500,000 this month.

You have like a 50 to $100 million business right now, depending on the.

Market, the valuations, how you're valuing. Yeah, maybe.

Huge advocate of Beehive for a while. A big user ourselves. We have a newsletter, about 70,000 people and there's nothing else even close to Beehive right now in the market. And you guys have come in at such a unique angle that I just need to get inside your mind, like how did you make such a user centric product?

I think we could cut it right now, put that on a 30 second ad and you can be the face of our brand. Yeah, I mean the story has been told many times. I guess my background is coming from Morning Brew and so I joined as a second employee, built that company alongside the early employees, the co founders up until acquisition. And so just having an inside track of what it takes to build a successful newsletter. It's very different from, I think newsletters are interesting. I'm going to build software around that. Yeah, I know exactly what it took like in the weeds to build this newsletter from 50,000 subscribers when I joined to three and a half million when I left. So what data did we collect? How do we slice it? What dashboards do we. Did we use what was like the referral program? What were the different growth mechanisms? And so I think having like a very fast user centric approach to this is how we have had the success that we've had early on.

So you essentially built all the internal like business solutions inside of Morning Brew? No one if you don't know, Morning Brew is a newsletter. Few million subscribers sold for like 70 something million dollars a few years ago. And one of the most well known stories today, but this man built all their internal systems and actually basically kind of built Beehive internally for them and then saw that as an opportunity to bring it to market as a separate entity. Once you left Morning Brew, I used.

Like I love startups and tech and I idolize like the early stories of like Facebook and Apple and like just like Silicon Valley startups. And those are the stories I would read growing up, the books I'd read. And it was my dream to start a company.

And so that you always have been in entrepreneurship. Why did you work at Morning Brew for three and a half years and then why'd you go to Google?

Austin Reif, who's the co founder now CEO of Morning Brew is from Baltimore as well. And he reached out to me. I was like on an hour long car ride home from D.C. and he was like, just like venting about the business and the opportunity. This is when Morning brew probably had 30, 40,000 subscribers. Like very early on he was debating going full time or like raising money and going full time or doing a big investment banking job in New York. And one thing he said was like, did you know Barstool is making like 40% of their revenue through merch or whatever the number was. But he was interested in merch. I was like, dude, I got you Shopify store. Like, okay, let me help you build. Because they had some brand affinity with like the mug and the logo and people wanted T shirts and hats or coffee mugs. So the first idea was like, I'll help you build a Shopify store. And then we started talking and he was like, the skim is growing so quickly. They were kind of like the trailblazers in the newsletter space and they have millions of subscribers and they have this like Skinbassadors program, this referral program that works really well. All these girls in New York that read it like love their ambassador program and are always sharing it, he's like, we should imitate that. And so he came to me and was like, can you build this for like $3,000 on the side? As I was freelancing in my parents basement building different projects. And the answer was like, no. I had absolutely no idea how to do it. But I kid you not, I have a screenshot on my phone. I think I had like $2.50 in my bank account. And I told him, I was like, yeah, I can figure that out, no problem. And for three weeks I was building this referral program, making it up as I went, had no idea, almost quit like five separate times at like 2am I'd be up and I'd be like, genuinely, I lied about being able to do this and I have no idea how I get past where I am now. And almost texted him, ended up not finishing it. Well, ended up not texting him and finishing it. And he looks at me, paid me the $3,000 is like, we have so many other projects to build. Do you want to keep working with us throughout the summer while you apply for full time jobs? So I just started contracting for them like 40, 60 hours a week, building the website, building, making the referral program better, building different components on like for the newsletter and the safe. I have like $120,000 of student debt just from paying for school myself. And so the safe move was I'm just going to go to dc, live with my friend and work at Deloitte as a consultant. And then out of nowhere, like I signed the offer, I was going to start in two weeks and Austin hits me up and goes, what do you think about joining Morning Brew full time, coming up to New York? And like at the time, and in retrospect seems like a no brainer because Morning Brew went on to be very successful at the time they had 50,000 subscribers. It was the two co founders and a writer in an NYU like dorm room type office thing. And I have so much debt and it was like such a risk at the time. And one of my friends who I went to with like just career advice was like, you're going to be one of 50,000 people in that job at Deloitte or the only person in the world building Morning Brew and doing that thing. And I just completely bet on myself. Dropped girlfriend, life in dc, friend moved up to New York in two months. And that was kind of how I got into the Morning Brew.

Do you get equity for taking that risk initially? Was that promised?

Yeah, yeah. So like it's pretty common in most startups to have some bit of equity. Yeah, I had a few percent.

A few percent, Few percent, not bad at all after the outcome that happened. But, but you did touch on something that I'm really, I think it's a really good lesson. You said yes to doing something that you had no idea how to do. And the like hustler in you said yes, I can do this, but internally you're freaking out because you have no idea how to make this referral system. So do you advise people to do that? Because you weren't that technical. But then you went on to like literally build all of the technical internal tools for Morning Brew. So almost you saying yes to doing something forced you to learn and then you were able to actually figure it out somehow. Just the Internet and then made your whole career and now you have a huge business that is a software company. So has that just been like a theme or like, I mean to my.

Own demise of like stress and like I've probably cut off like 10 to 15 years of my life, like always deal it making that decision. But I would actually attribute most of my success in my career to putting myself in situations where I was always way over my head because I'm not someone who's ever going to give up. And when you're not going to give up and you're in way over your head. The only way is up and hustling and figuring out whether it means late nights, whether it means watching tutorials online, scheduling calls with people who know what they're doing and learning from them. Like there's multiple paths to figure out how to solve whatever problem it is.

Did you do that a lot? Schedule calls with people and ask them.

I mean, even at morning I knew nothing about email or newsletters. Meanwhile, I was given the job of growing this email newsletter and building the internal tech for it. And so I would just schedule demos with like mailchimp or Campaign Monitor, like all these different lightning platforms. Well, because they, they were vendors to us. Oh, okay. So that we were trying to vet like you should we send? And I had no idea even like what I should be looking at. So I like scheduled calls with other people in the newsletter space who knew they would hit different pain points and be like, what should I be looking out for when I go to these calls? And then when we jumped on the calls with like Campaign Monitor, hypothetically, it would be like talking about deliverability. And I, they'd brush over and I'd be like, wait, what is that? Like what, what should I know about this? And why are you better than the competitors? And so I was like scheduling demos with every like email vendor or like software vendor in the space and like the newsletter space and the CMS space just to understand what I didn't know, which was everything Smart did.

I don't think that was possible like 10, 15 years ago, but now that we have the Internet like it, it.

Really is you crazy.

Figure anything out?

Yeah, literally all day.

That's so cool. Did you leave on good terms? Like you didn't leave right when they sold? You left?

I left like a few weeks before and I had no idea that they were getting acquired. So I'd say like yes and no. For three and a half years at Morning Brew, I kind of had no restrictions of what to do. They trusted me and they said if you think this is going to work, try it for a month or two. And fortunately, like, there's definitely some luck involved. A lot of the things I built and tried ended up working. So they kept giving me more responsibility to try new things. And so we did that. We scaled over 3 million subscribers. And then I started to see the writing on the wall. Like, okay, they're making, I don't know, 15, 20 million dollars a year. Now I am 26, still self taught, and they're going to start legitimizing the business bringing in people who have been like, a product manager at Vice or Vox for 10 years. And one, I'm definitely, like, a bit stubborn. And I was like, I know this space better than anyone that they could bring in, and I know this business inside and out. And so there's a part of me that's like, I don't really want to report to anyone else. And then there was also the part of me of, yes, I'm willing to learn from other people, but I don't know if a PM at Vice is, like, who I want to learn from.

Yeah, it's like you're getting chained or something.

Like, it's just like a media company. PM isn't what I found, like, super aspirational. I wanted to learn from, like, big tech and, like, what are the products and companies that are making billions of dollars, like, how do they do product? And so tying that all together, I kind of saw the writing on the wall that I was about to have a boss that wasn't Austin and get hired over. Oh, that's. And. And the time came where, I don't know, three and a half years is a long time to be anywhere. And it went from, there was so much to do. I could do anything and build anything to everything was built. It was like optimizing the website to convert a little bit better. So I'd say, like, the fun part was kind of running out for me personally in, like, the product and engineering space. So that was like, the itch of, what else can I do and build? And, like, this was a great chapter. I owe everything to Alex and Austin for giving me the opportunity. And I was like, I think I'm down to try something else as, like, a next step in my career and just, like, kind of building out, like, the resume. Like, I knew I was always going to build a startup, any company, at one point, but it was, where do I go to refine the skills that I know that I'm not great at and being able to learn what product management is. Everyone says Google's like, the gold standard of product management. There's, like, real process. There's, like, how you think about user journeys. I go, I don't know what any of that means, like, in an actual process standpoint. So let's go figure that out. And that's kind of how I ended up at Google.

Would you say you got that out of the experience?

Like, 100%.

Okay.

In retrospect, like, I can. I was there for 10 months. It was like a. It was a Pit stop. And it was during COVID and I've.

Always thought about doing that. Like I feel like that is a gap in my knowledge. So what were like the three like biggest takeaways? Yeah, obviously you left.

I mean every year everything there was about process. So the way that they did it at Google that I learned is if you want to build a product or a feature, like a product requirement document, like a PRD is like a full like 5, 10, 15 page paper of here's how it should work, here's what it looks like, what are the mock ups? What do you what happens when you click on this button? Where does that take users? Who's like the target user? How do you measure success? Like typical things that you want to.

Know, like Figma design, like you throw.

In like form a design but also just like, yeah, but also just explaining like here's like how users get to this feature. This is why it's useful. This is why we're allocating like 8 engineers time for 2 months to build this, to give it outcome. It's almost like making it an argument for why you're building and got you other because like for example, like in retrospect at Morning Brew when I said I'm going to spend three months building a cms, I had no idea how I was going to do that. I didn't think about any of the obstacles and I had no idea what it was going to look like or how it was going to work at the end, which is like as dumb as possible. Like it would have been much easier just to plan for two weeks of this is what the final state is. Here's the components we're going to use. This is like the tech we're going to use and the end goal is this. And I think it'll be worth it because xyz so that's how like normal companies think about things before they invest like tons of people and money and time into building it. And I never knew that I was just like kind of building whatever I felt like building at Morning Brew. So I'd say understanding that from Google, like what are the different components of that document and like what's the case to be made was totally new to me. And then once you have like this is how it should work, how it should look. Now an engineer owns it and they kind of build like a technical scoping document of here's what we're adding in the database. Here are like the models we're adding. Here's like the actual code that is going to make that thing come to life. And then the engineer that kind of owns that process. It's kind of like the same process but for engineering instead of product.

So do you build off this master sheet as you go or you're more so just planning it all together so then four different levels of management can improve it. 30 different people on the teams can see it so they're on the same page.

For the product side, it's like part of it's like pitching to management of like this. It's like more of a layman's terms of this is what's going to happen, this is how we're building it on the engineering side. Like you don't want to have an engineer or team of engineers just coding and tinkering for weeks without like an end goal. So the goal is for them to say, here's how we're going to build it.

Exactly how.

This is exactly how we're going to build it. And then you pitch it to like the engineers and the engineers will poke holes in and be like, actually I think it'd be more performant if you do it like this or you're completely forgetting this other thing that we built previously that will help you do X, Y, Z. But you're basically just getting sign off and more smart people's opinion before someone goes heads down for six weeks building something which makes perfect sense. And then once the product team and managers and end users have seen like the PRD and they're like, okay, that looks good, then the engineers have seen the technical doc and the engineers like, I agree, that's a great way to build it. Then the engineer can go and build it and then it works as it's described and it fits into the PRD anyway. That's all totally new to me and something I had no idea that existed prior to Google. Google, we couldn't like build a button without those two steps and like 10, 15 pages of each.

It's a lot of time.

It's a lot of time and it's a lot of planning. And like Google, you know, the people both from PMs to engineers are really expensive and they don't want to waste people's time and they don't want to have someone build something that doesn't make sense or work as it should. So I'd say that is my biggest takeaway from my 10 months at Google. Outside the fact that nothing really gets done at large, that's probably the most.

Valuable takeaway for what you transitioned into for Beehive.

You're probably that process that I just described is exactly how we built everything at Beehive to an extent. Less bureaucracy than what you would get at Google obviously and much quicker and quicker turnaround and everything. But the system's more or less the exact same. Any feature or product release that's over a certain threshold, we do the prd, we do the technical scoping doc, we get sign off and then they build it and then they ship it. But I would have had no idea how to do that if it wasn't for my 10 month stint at Google.

Just knowing how the best people in the world do something is super valuable because then you're not like questioning, is there a better method? Am I being like inefficient in a way? And so seeing firsthand and knowing for sure this is how the biggest company in the world operates and then bringing that to your own company, I can just imagine that's way more valuable than the salary you were getting.

But yeah, I mean that's also like my chip on the shoulder for everything is that I was as a self taught software developer, every time I coded a single line of code anywhere, I was like, did I do that right?

Were you kind of insecure?

Always. I've always been like, and the thing is, and you learn later that a lot of people who went through the computer science program, they don't teach you how to build websites and a lot of the or most computer science programs don't. So a lot of the engineers who did like four years of CS actually didn't learn the things I was building anyway. But not being told by like a teacher or superior like, this is how it's done. I was writing code for Morning Brew for four years when they had millions of readers and like I was the boss of like the engineering team and I had, every time I typed a line of code I go, I don't know if this is right or performant or if there's a better way. But that like, yeah, there's like different spectrums. I'd say I'm far right on, like the fuck it, let's see what happens. Or as long as it works, it's good enough for me. And then as I've hired engineers, they're much on like, here's the most efficient, optimized process and it might take like three weeks longer, but it will be the most performant. And I love that balance because we end up meeting somewhere in between of like, we don't need the most perfect elegant solution. That's Going to last to the year like 3000. We just need something that works for the next four to five years. So like let's get it to market quicker. So it's a good balance to have.

That's funny because you have like the most scrappy just figured out at Morning Brew. Then you go to Google, it's like the complete far right, the most extreme. And now you have Beehive, which is probably perfectly in the middle.

And it's so interesting for the engineers too because like that is like how they show off. Like their intellect is like, I've thought about the most performant way to build X and I think it's more performant than the way that you're proposing. And they kind of like nerd off on like, what's the better solution? And I'm like, there's real market opportunity being wasted by not already having something live. And I'm getting it from 15 of our users that this needs to be live yesterday. So like let's just get to market. And it's finding the balance between good solution that works well and won't break, but it doesn't need to be the most performant thing at least like not today.

Yeah, I think going the unconventional route of learning, you definitely got more range. Like you have much more diverse knowledge and you're going to pick and choose what you needed that you could action immediately at Morning Brew instead of like a textbook. Here's what you can do. So it kind of opens up more creativity. Yeah, Speaking of creativity, let's go to Beehive.

Yeah, People trying for a few.

This is what I really like. This.

Yeah, yeah.

If you're going to send the podcast, let's send it. At this point, this is where it's going to get really detailed. So Beehive, the most valuable way I've thought about it is typically for a newsletter business, if you don't know a newsletter is just like you send an email to people every week about a topic, but most people will just write in a Google Doc and then upload like a mailchimp and then send it out to a thousand people. And then they would just get an email list from like a quick, maybe like a mailchimp landing page at best, if they even had that back then. But Beehive has like the most streamlined, user friendly system to grow, scale and write a newsletter and now actually get sponsors, which was like the most annoying process for us. So I totally understand all the value from Beehive here, but what I want to understand is what when you launched 19 months ago, what did you go to market with? What features existed and why did you choose those features?

Yeah. So, and even to take a step back from what you were describing, like, I saw that entire cycle while at Morning Brew, like, we had a custom built, like, squarespace word or a squarespace website that collected emails and that, like, somehow connected to mailchimp to send the email.

Yeah, it wasn't even connected from Mailchimp.

And then like, we had a WordPress website that we would type stories into and then our writers would copy and paste it into like an HTML template and send it on mailchimp.

Clunky.

So, like, what a lot of people, even to this day still do is they have like some web content, which is like a webflow or WordPress, where their blog lives totally separate. They have like, their email list. Sometimes they collect emails, like IRL and upload them via CSV. Otherwise they like, literally take them from, like, their WordPress site, export them and import them before sending. It's like, very convoluted.

Yeah.

And so there's a lot of value in having a streamlined process where the website, the blog and the newsletter all live, like, symbiotically. And that's kind of what we've built at Morning Brew. And so to answer your question of what we went to market with, you pitched it pretty well in like, almost like internal Morning Brew tools like Morning Brew in a Box. It substack launched, I think, four or five years ago. And their core innovation, I think, was combining the website with the newsletter with premium subscriptions. So that already existed in the market where I thought that they were weak and just talking to users who were complaining about using the existing solutions. Like, the referral program was kind of like a holy grail of Morning Brew. When I was there, it led to over a million subscribers, which is crazy. We had a list dedicated to people who had more than three referrals, and that list had over 100,000 people on it. That's like, bigger than like 95% of email lists in general. And those were just for people with more than three referrals. So the referral program was a massive growth driver for us. And I wrote like a blog post on it that's like, very detailed, and I still get hit up about it. So that was like a golden nugget of what people people wanted. At the end of the day, I think most content creators care about, like, two things. It's growing and monetizing, and if you can create tools that allow them to Grow quicker and monetize more. Most content creators, businesses, publishers are very happy. So the positioning was the existing solutions in the market. We can do everything that they can do. You can post content to the website. You can also simultaneously send out a newsletter. We'll handle all of that for you. There's no like exporting, importing will give you a referral program to help you streamline and scale your audience quicker. Which I had the legitimacy and credibility from Morning Brew saying I've already built Morning Brews which is like an industry leading referral program. So now for $99 a month you get the same thing that made Morning Brew or one of the many things that made Morning Brew successful out of the box, like minimal setup. So that was like a go to market strategy that was very intentional. And then the other one was yes on substack or member for like any of the other platforms, you can do a premium subscription. You don't have to worry about stripe and billing and payments. We'll do that, but we won't take a cut of revenue. So if you're making $100,000 a month and they're taking 10%, you can just move over to our platform. You keep the 400,000 minus the stripe fees. And so hitting on the two main components of growing faster and monetizing more was like our initial go to market.

So the core features, you got the landing page builder and you collect emails, correct?

Yep.

And then you could do a referral program natively within the platform and then you could do a paid subscription for your newsletter. I miss one?

Yeah, I mean and like send newsletter. So you create. There's a net, there's an editor, you post, a web like blog, you post as an email. You can do both at the same time. And then you can do premium subscriptions and you can do the referral program.

So this is basically like the solopreneur's like dream setup or the creator that you referenced. Because what you referenced was kind of how the big companies were doing it. They had dozens of developers on their team. They have the website, they have SMS or not sms. Cms. What is it? Email?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

They had all these different like websites to collect information. They can communicate because they had the budget and the people to do it. But if you're just an everyday person with a skill and a specific interest, it was a lot of money, a lot of different tools, a lot of time and you just want to write about the specific topic. So you just made it as easy as possible for people to make a place for people to subscribe and write the email, send it out, and then grow all in one place. And that was your go to market strategy.

Exactly. And the thing is, like, most really, really talented engineers aren't dying to work at like a small publisher. So even like the tech teams that do exist at a lot of these publishers and small, like media startups aren't like the top tier talent. I mean, typically, typically. And like what we built at Morning Brew took me and a team of three additional engineers three and a half years to build. So we built this like perfect ecosystem for email newsletters to grow quickly, to understand who our audience is, to be able to sell advertisements and monetize. And it took us trialing and erroring and failing so many times. And three and a half years of a team of dedicated engineers just for that. And so the value prop is if you could take everything that we learned in those three and a half years and you don't need to hire four engineers and you don't need to piece together eight different pieces of software or build your own solution, wouldn't it be a lot nicer to pay $99 a month and have people that know how to do it provide that for you out of the box? And that was like our initial go to market strategy.

So how did you launch?

So we were building it while I was at Google. So like nights and on the sides. On the side.

Oh, nice.

Just like very stressful. It's like the classic, like startup journey. But like, I mean, some people are like, bucket, I have enough money to live off of. I'm just going to go in a hole, work for a few months, try to raise money again. Like, I've had one job prior to this at Morning Brew. Like younger in my career, still have student debt. So as de risked as possible. Like, I had a job and I was doing nights and weekends, which is incredibly draining. But it was also, I think I benefited a bit from it being Covid. So, like, there wasn't like fun things to do per se. Like, I was kind of like stuck inside anyway, some of the most productive.

Days of my life.

I built the big Desk Energy website during that. Like, where other people were like, oh, this is sick. Let's like order in wine and watch Netflix for like eight hours. Like, I never watched Tiger King. But like, that was, that's the test I was like, now that I've been given, like, because I caved a peer press, like, I have like a social life, I want to go out, hang out with friends. But now that you've removed that as an option, how do I actually view this as like a massive opportunity where I don't have to be like some loser being no, I don't want to hang out. Don't be mad about it. Like, I have no one.

I think a lot of I have.

No one to say no to and like I don't have to make up excuses. There was nothing to do. So I was like, how can I just be as much of a psychopath right now and go heads down and provide as much value and learn and build things. So this is 2020. We started like fall of 2020 into like the summer of 2021. Nights, weekends, just like hustling building this company. And the whole time like I think any entrepreneur or like early startup is just super anxious because like very often very rare for you to be the first one to market. So you're always going against competitors that already exist. You already have a team of 10, 20, 30 people who already have a ton of money. And you're going to market because you think you can either do it better than them or you're taking a different approach to solve a problem that they're not doing a good job of solving. But it's also like the most anxiety inducing time because if my thesis hypothetically was we're going to go to market with a referral program, that entire 12 months of like stealth of us building, all it took was like one of our competitors to be like, oh that sounds like a great idea. We're going to launch like an amazing referral program mimicked after morning brew. And I'm sitting there with no money and just like hustling on like two o' clock in the morning on like a Saturday and I go fuck. Like I just bet all my eggs in this basket and I've been hustling and like it's not the only differentiator, but it was one of the, your, it was one of the ones that we were going to go to market with and like that I knew would be splashy. And every day I'd wake up with like that anxiety of like did any of like our main like 5, 6 competitors launch something similar to what we're building now? Again, substack was already raised. I think they were worth like 600 mil at this point. And like the clear market leader of the new age newsletter platform and like we're making waves there. Facebook just launched bulletin like a few months before we started raising money. It was like their attempt to do Like a newsletter platform as a part of Facebook because they have infinite dollars. They were just going to like Malcolm Gladwell and like all these A list writers and paying them to create newsletters on bulletin, which never made any sense, but they have enough money to try anything. Twitter bought Review a year earlier which was like Twitter's newsletter platform. And a lot of newsletter people are pretty active on Twitter. It's like a pretty one to one correlation. Good at writing, good at writing newsletters. And they had like the whole sign up in your bio which like everyone viewed as like the greatest thing ever. And so we got to market, we built it up until summer of 2021. We raised a seed round in July of 2020.

So from that time to when you raise. How long was that?

I think we did about like 10 months.

10 months?

Yourself? Me and my two co founders.

How much did you raise in the seed?

We did 2.6 million.

Oh my God. In the seed? Yeah. So but did you launch the product before that, before you raised the seed round?

No. So we were like in like the mvp, like had a prototype and I think I tweeted maybe right before I started going out to raise money, I tweeted like that was when I like put my cards on the table. I was like, I've been building a newsletter platform that will do XYZ not take a cut of revenue, has a referral program and totally customizable website newsletter, if that's something you'd be interested in. Sign up for our waitlist here. So I just did like a Google form waitlist got I think like 450, 500 people to sign up.

Just a tweet.

Just a tweet.

And so that followers did you have?

I don't have that many followers. Maybe like 3,000 at the time.

You had 3,000 followers and 500 of them signed up to try it?

Yeah.

Well, you kind of had people.

I kind of been like cultivating like a. I had a very dense of like 10 to 15 people that I was like, have they, have they launched this yet? Or do you think that this is a good way to build this? Like I had like an internal squad of people that I was just bouncing ideas off of. Or like I'd show them a screenshot, do you prefer A or B? And they'd be like, okay, let's go with B. So kind of cultivating like early adopters. And they are pretty big in the newsletter space. So I mean as far as I don't know how big or small the newsletter market is. But, like, I had that kind of down from my Morning Brew days, and, like, that is what I was working with.

It's kind of hard for me to tell because I've been, like, obsessed with the newsletter. YouTube, like, Sampar, where I've been in it for, like, a year. And same with Twitter. So, like, I'm in this algorithm, and.

So I don't know, you see, is news.

Is it like. Yeah. Is it like. Is it every.

That's all you see? That's all I see.

Yeah. Is it like, every person has a newsletter now? Is it, like, super popular? Or am I just, like, bombarded? Because that's what my algorithm is trained for?

You probably both.

Yeah.

I would say that I think people are catching on to, like, of the different medium. Like this right here, this podcast. You have, like, real equipment. You have, like, an editor. You have to chop it up. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of effort. The unit economics of a newsletter are so amazing.

And so what does that mean, unit economics?

Like, whether you're sending to 10 people or 10 million people, the amount of work that goes into the newsletter is more or less the same. And, like, the infrastructure costs are also, like, very favorable in terms of, like, the actual cost to send the emails.

Gotcha.

So the way that I looked at it is there was a point at Morning Brew when it was the two founders, there was the writer, there was me and someone on growth. And so we had sales down, which was what one of the founders was working on. We had writing, we had growth, and we had tech. So like, four and a half, five people, and we were making five, six million dollars a year at that point. And, like, they decided to go the venture back of, like, how much bigger can we make this? And, like, made the right decision because they got acquired for a lot of money.

Yeah.

But, like, we could have made that a lifestyle business. And U.S. 5 could have been printing between 5 and 10 million dollars a year. And, like, that output that we were putting, like, the effort we were putting into that remain constant, whether we were sending to 1 million people or we could have scaled that to 10, 15 million readers. So it's like, the effort that goes into a newsletter is pretty flat. And with platforms like Beehive that make it so affordable to get started, like, there's no, like, upfront risk. Like, you can get started for free.

Can you explain a lifestyle business? Because I like that term.

What that. I mean, that, like, what that is. Like, a lifestyle business.

Yeah, a lifestyle business versus, like, A startup, venture backed startup, like venture backed.

Startup is like, you're always chasing more and more money, higher growth and like you like, no, there's no end to it. You're either. If you've already saturated your market, you're looking for new markets, you're looking to hire new teams, you're looking to make the product a bit better, you're trying to get better margins, which I guess like every business kind of is, but a lifestyle business is like, what if you could just print three to five million dollars and like everyone, it doesn't have to be a dollar amount, but you're making enough money and you can take care of the people who are working for you and everyone gets paid really well and you're like, okay, I'm.

Good, just do what? Do this.

Well, maybe everyone's making like 250, 300k and like it's great. Like you don't have aspirations to flip it and 10, 15, 20 million vacation.

You can have, but you also have.

Not always chasing growth. And as someone who has always chased growth and like the big thing and try to make things better, there's a big part of me that admires people who like, chill.

Yeah.

Who can just be like, yo, this is good. And I'm going to go into like, you just got back from a three week vacation, right. Like, I would love to go away for a few days and chill and not think about work. And I'm so far from that. But there's plenty of people that have a situation in business where it's not constantly chasing the next thing and they're doing really well, they're solving a problem, they have a successful business and they're probably living a much healthier lifestyle without the expectations that they need to keep doing more.

A newsletter is a really good lifestyle business for like solo creators for sure. $10,000, $20,000 a month, super achievable. And they can just write one newsletter a week.

You can also do it as a complete side project.

Right.

A lot of people are PMs at a company or have like a great paying job, but they have a hobby or passion towards either something related to their work or something totally different that they're just interested in. And because they're interested in it, they want to learn about it, they want to write about it, they develop influence in this space and then they get advertisers or they do premium subscriptions, affiliates. Like there's so many different ways to monetize a newsletter. It really is just like top of funnel and even if you don't go for like, hey, I want to make thousands of dollars from this newsletter, maybe 15,000 people follow you because you're an expert at the Phoenix Suns and you know everything about the roster, their team, their GM and whatever. And you've grown influence in a space that people look up to you in some capacity. And like, there's a lot of advantages to that. Maybe you get a job at the Phoenix Suns, right?

100% and the network, like random connections of people, like, there's so many doors that could open. But I never realized how much money you can make from newsletters. No matter who you are or what you do, you should start a newsletter. It is the best way for business owners to talk to their customers, build an email list and most importantly, increase sales. Morning Brew, the newsletter sold for $75 million. And you can literally get started completely for free on Beehive and start monetizing immediately. So to help you guys get started, we created A list of 80 different newsletter ideas and we'll send that to you completely for free. Just click the first link in the description below. But I never realized how much money you can make from newsletters until like seven months ago. Like people told me to start one two years ago. I was like, I'd laugh at them. Like, why? Like, it's email. I'm on YouTube. Like, that's way more valuable or something. People are paying. Sponsors pay so much for newsletters. 10,000 people on newsletter. You can make 10, 20, 30k a month if it's like the right quality of people.

And if you're already creating content like in the YouTube space, you're already thinking about things, you're talking to interesting people, you already have content down. Why not shift some of the content that you're creating in video and like, do a summary of that and put it in a newsletter form. There's like AI tools that will help you with that. You can hire a ghostwriter to be like, here's a two hour interview I did with the founder of X. I think this space is so interesting. Let's dedicate the month of March to a weekly newsletter about that topic. And you can get four weeks worth of newsletters just from this one two hour interview. And like, you're. Not everyone's going to watch the YouTube videos. Not everyone's going to read the newsletter. But it's like a very symbiotic relationship of at the bottom of every newsletter, hey, follow my YouTube channel. At the end of every YouTube video, hey, subscribe to my newsletter. And you just have more touch points of engaging with the audience.

Every creator needs it. Whether it's your TikTok or Instagram, YouTuber, you're a business anybody because once you have their email, you now own that list of people. If your YouTube gets taken down for breaking a rule, you're out of luck. But if you have that email list, maybe you can build up a new channel and send them your new channel. So like you have a point of contact with these.

I mean how devastating would it be? Like in the YouTube examples one, I know like the Montana ban for TikTok didn't last very long, but hypothetically let's say there's like geopolitical issues and TikTok gets shut down. 95% of your audience is concentrating on TikTok. Like what now they'll never be able to find no way to find those people again. And you didn't own that relationship or have any of the data points on your readers. TikTok did. And the same could be said for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. And so the difference in like that is like the advantages of email, but you really own your audience. It's direct one to one. Facebook can shift their algorithms or Instagram any way that they want. Where maybe you were getting 100,000 views on your videos, but someone at Instagram doesn't like your content or whatever. Like the algorithm shifts to focus more on community based. Or maybe they, with the upcoming election they want more political based content. Now your videos are getting significantly less views, you have less influence, you have no way to get in front of your audience because you don't have a direct relationship with them. Your only relationship was Instagram or TikTok boosting your videos to their feed. But once that goes away, there's, you're kind of like shit out of luck, right? So it really is like an ultimate hedge of understanding. Like here's a direct line I have to my audience. I can ask them what's your favorite sports team or what content do you want more of or where do you live or whatever. And like those data points, you're collecting first party data. Now you understand your audience. I think some of the platforms are getting better at surfacing some of that data for the creators, but it's also their data, it's not exportable. Like there's not data portability from TikTok to YouTube. And the, the good and bad thing about the business that I operate in is like complete data portability which is one our advantage to take customers from other platforms because you can export your email list and your data and move it over to Beehive. It also adds a tremendous amount of stress and pressure because if we ever fuck up, we're one export away from going to one of our competitors as well. So it's a two way street. But that is also kind of like the beauty of the newsletter space. Like that's your email list and you can take it wherever you want.

That's really important. And I think people might skip over that. But it's very easy for your YouTube account to get banned. Copyright claim, or you say something they don't like, even if it's political, they will literally destroy your YouTube account, delete it, and not let you back on YouTube and you're screwed if you don't have the email. So every person, every creator, every business should have a newsletter. You should do it on Beehive.

There we go.

E E H I I V. Right?

Yeah. You nailed it. A lot of practice.

Yeah, well, I've used it. Yeah. And I see it in the link in the URLs all the time, which is genius. And this is what I want to talk about. Your product led growth, your viral loops. Best in the business 100. Because now it's just like a certain, like a critical mass of people and it's continuing to grow. And you recently posted that chart of your growth. And so take me to the beginning. Like once you raise that $2.6 million, you wanted to bring the product to market, launch it. What strategy did you do? Product hunts? Did you have an email list already built up? How did you actually get out there after the waitlist was over? Have you tried and what were your first like, marketing angles? And then how has it kind of just grown to the 500k it is now?

Yeah, very loaded question. There's so many different. Go through it all, but let's hit it. So to start one, we had our wait list of 500 people. So the easiest, lowest hanging fruit was hitting up all of them, like, hey, we launched, check it out. And me just persistently emailing these people and annoying them to move over. I'd say maybe 100 of the 500 moved over at some point in like the next three to six months. So there was the initial, like, hey, I'm interested in what you're building. There was. Of the 2.6 million we raised. Social Leverage is actually based in Scottsdale and, and San Diego. They were like our main lead investor in the seed, but we also had about 15 to 20 strategic investors and Strategic investors, meaning they had an email list, they had a large following on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. Okay, and that was very like, fuck, Jerry. Like that team, they invested. The. The example I always use is like Liquidity, the meme account on Instagram and Twitter, he had a newsletter of a hundred thousand people called Execsum that was sending on a different platform. And so as investors, they're financially incentivized to make sure that we succeed. And so they were really our early adopters. It sounds so simple and I don't know why more startups don't go at the market like this. Like, why not get investors who are going to be your early customers? Because the early customers are by far the hardest to get. We launched and our product is the worst it'll ever be. Like, we have, it's a very established space, it's very competitive and we're a month old, right? So like we have the least features we'll ever have. All of our competitors have 10 times more functionality. There's so much more polished. The product's good, but like not amazing by any means. It's going to get better and it has. So you really need early adopters that believe in you. And like, what better than the people who just wrote you like 100k check to say, like, hey, in order for this to get off the ground, we need some early traction. So Liquidity moved his newsletter of 100,000 people from whatever platform he was using before to us. We offered more customization, we made sure it looked really good. We added the referral program, we had like polls into it. And now his audience of 100,000 people that have been receiving his newsletter for a year plus overnight, see a better looking newsletter on a better website with a referral program and like polls, like all these features and it's like very noticeable when you start. He sends it five days a week, when you start your morning with it every day. And it's very different. So that's like the first, like, holy shit, something changed here. I wonder what it is. And if you scroll down, you see at the bottom in the footer, which is like the classic growth hacking mechanism of like powered by Beehive in the footer of the newsletter and on the website. And so you take that 100,000 audience, maybe a few percent of them notice that it's now being sent with Beehive or people reach out to him like, yo, newsletter looks a lot better. What changes? Like, I moved over to this new company I invested in Beehive. They check it out. So that's like how the viral loop starts. And you multiply that by the 10, 15 other strategic investors had a large list as well, all standing on us, plus the 100 people on the wait list. And that's like the initial, like, viral loops that were kind of set into place when we launched Intentionality.

I think that's going to be the catchphrase this podcast, because every successful person I talk to has that strategy decided before they launch their product or before they've ever brought on investors. You probably had that core idea. You guys don't know what I'm talking about. Literally, when you send. If you get an. If someone has a newsletter on Beehive and you send the newsletter to 100,000 people, if you scroll down to the bottom of the newsletter, there's just a link. It's a logo that's hyperlinked, and it says Powered by Beehive. And so, like you said, 1 or 2% of people might get curious and be like, what is Beehive? Or maybe they're thinking of writing a newsletter themselves. So they're looking for, how does this person make his newsletter? And so there's a very clear visual and a link that they can get curious and click on and be like, oh, this is a newsletter delivery software. And so then they start using Beehive, because the favorite newsletter that they read uses Beehive.

It's also, like, one of the more controversial points with our customers, because a lot of people want. We offer white labeling now, but before we'd have, like, very large customers being like, this is my brand. I don't want Powered by Beehive in the footer, which is, like, totally reasonable. But I saw all of the data and I knew how valuable it was to have it in there. And the second you remove it from one customer, even if they're paying, like 100, $200 extra, like, it only takes two users to see that click through and convert, where we've already made that 200 and some. So, like, I knew the data of how valuable that was, and I made the somewhat controversial, like, like, stubborn or, like, arrogant assumption. I was like, I know our software is better, I know, and we're so much cheaper. So if you, if you're that pity breaker, if you're that opinionated about, like, the few people who stroll all the way to the bottom and see that. And, like, plus, we're trying to build a cool brand so it's not like a shitty logo with, like, whatever. Like, it's very small and it's at the very bottom and I think it's a cool brand. So I was like fairly arrogant and said if you want, if that's a deal breaker for you, I'll let you walk, but that means you're going to pay for worse software that costs five times as much somewhere else. And I made the calculated bet that like yes, maybe 1 in 20 people would not sign with us or would churn because of that. But I knew how much growth it was generating for us and I knew that the value prop was strong enough that they'd stick around. And most people did. But that was like a big point of contention. We've since. But we needed that to get off the ground, right? Like we hit a point of like not escape velocity. Like most people probably still don't know who we are, but we're at a point we have enough foundational growth and people who are using like without white labeled where we can then offer where you can pay out of it. But it took us like 16 months and a lot of people bitching about it to like finally be like, I think I've seen enough or like we've, we have enough of a brand presence where you can pay your way and white label. But it would like that's another lesson that I learned is we grew a lot from being active on Twitter and social media. And as a startup you get so many touch points of customers that like things and don't like things and you have to be very careful of what advice you take, the amount of internal employees who would see like 10 people tweeting like bitching at us like, hey, like Beehive sucks. Like, or like they're great but they won't remove their branding from the newsletter. It's a total deal breaker for me. Like total piece of shit software. Like they don't care about their users. And like one of our employees would like send me 10 of these tweets and like you have to like one take that feedback. But also be like there's a method to the madness. Like, yeah, I know the data and I know that people are allowed and opinionated. It's very easy to have like a knee jerk reaction and be like, oh, let's just remove it then because these 10 people are really loud. But you don't see the 5,000 other people using the software not complaining about IT or the 10 or 15,000 accounts that have signed up from the people clicking through. And like you have to be very level headed and not like a knee jerk reaction to everything and so like there is a part of like I'm building this business because I know what's better and like what product works better. There's also like I see the data that customers who are complaining don't say and maybe it pisses off one person but the ROI is so much greater and like you just have to be very level headed about.

You have to have confidence in your product being so good though it's kind of like negotiating like we're going to leave it. It's too crucial for our growth. This is how our business hits $100 million. So if you don't like it, you can leave.

And we've had plenty of people who are, who were like, hey, this is a deal breaker for me. And I was like okay. Well they named the three other competitors that they were considering. And so I go, okay, competitor A is four times the cost and they don't have XYZ features. So you're gonna have to buy these three new softwares, combine them together to get the end functionality you're going for and now you're paying 8x the cost. Same thing for competitor B, same thing for competitor C. So I lay it out for them and I go, I can commit to like considering removing white labeling in the future and offering that. I can't promise you but I were keeping it on now and those are your options. And I'd say like 9 out of 10 looked at their options and chose to stay with us because you have a great product.

So.

But yeah it's, that was like one of my big takeaways of like early days. Like you just get so many inputs and being very methodical and data driven about things and not letting emotion take over some of your decision making is like really important.

And the amount of Beehive URLs I see in people's bios now is just so common in my circle. And the fact that it makes way more sense because it's really convenient for the solopreneur to just use the quickest domain and it's a beehive domain slash the name of their newsletter. But do they have the optionality to change the domain?

Yeah, for $50 a month. I mean you could always change the domain. Like that was like a non starter so you could always.

But it makes sense for to have it there for the beginner which huge win for your company or very and.

You can pay out of it like $50 a month which is like super cheap and do whatever to double click on like other growth strategies or early Days like, we had the strategic investors who were our early adopters and early users which like, helped us get off the ground. We had the wait list. We've also established ourselves as a company that ships product very quickly. And that's very intentional. And part of it's because one like we. Our initial team was me and three engineers, so four technical people. And as I said, like, the product was the. We weren't in stealth for five years building like the industry leading product. The goal was always to get there. But when you first launch, like, we are the worst product in the market. We're the least polished, we're lacking all the features that our competitors have. So like what you, how you get people to trust you is off of like credibility narrative and promising that you're going to build things that don't yet exist and hoping that they believe you and then doing it and then you have to do it, obviously. So the credibility was, hey, we built this. At Morning Brew, the early adopters proved like, look, it works and they're having success. Look at the exact sum and Liquidity's newsletter, like, it looks better. He's getting great feedback. The product works. I know we're missing these 10 things, but we're going to get there and let me prove to you that we can ship product very quickly. So I would study what our competitors were missing, what people were complaining. Like, this platform doesn't allow you to do this, or I really want to do X, Y, Z and I can find a solution that does that. In my mind, it's like, okay, let's, like, let's start with that. If people are already complaining that other competitors don't offer that or that they, it's just missing in the market. Let's focus on building that first.

That's a great piece of advice right there.

So we, I mean it's just being very active on Twitter and like social.

And seeing, looking at specifically what people are complaining about your competitors.

And so we would see like, competitor X doesn't do these five things. Like, okay, that's our roadmap for the next month. Let's build those five things. So we like narrow and we build those five things and then we be very loud about it. So we launch, we have like a product announcement email and I'd send out an email to all of our users. So one, it's like product education. You're a user of Beehive. This just launched. You should take advantage of it. Like, it didn't exist yesterday, now it exists. So it's One, educating users. But it's two, signaling to the market, hey, if you wanted to do this and you were one of those people complaining that this platform doesn't allow that, you can now do that on Beehive. And here's like the four other things we just launched too. So it's a marketing strategy to show other people that exist that our solution solves a pain point that other competitors don't have. So it's both product education and marketing. And then people adopt it and then you just rinse and repeat. So you find, I'd say one, the things that make our product good but not great and that people are complaining about, we prioritize those as features and initiatives. Things that people are complaining about on other platforms that you can't do, we prioritize those. And just like interesting, flashy utility things that either help you grow faster or make more money or also prioritize. And so the combination of those, it's like, how do we prioritize, prioritize building those as quickly as possible. We make a huge deal when we do launch them and then rinse, wash, repeat every two weeks. And the narrative then becomes, holy shit, they're launching so many value add features. Or it also becomes, again, the uncertainty and like, the chip on my shoulder of like, we didn't have the 15 features that all of our competitors have, but if we are known to be shipping so quickly, the narrative sets into people in the market being like, they don't have that yet, but they ship so quickly they will soon. So if we had won you over as a potential user for 9 out of 10 things, but we were missing that one thing, the hope is that you've seen our track record of shipping products so quickly that you know that 10th thing will be there sooner or later. And that was all, like, very, very intentional.

Was email your main way of communicating that message to your users or was there a community platform?

So we sent an email to all the product updates or email, but then we post it to Twitter, LinkedIn, every social platform, essentially.

It's almost like your content strategy was just constant. New feature, new feature, new feature, explaining why it's good for them. So you're educating them, providing them value on how to make their job better. A lot of them probably don't even know they need that feature, but since you've lived it for so long, you're educating them with content while also providing it for them.

Yeah, I mean, again, it all comes.

That's a cool content strategy.

It all comes from the anxiety of not thinking we're good enough and that we need to. We need to prove that we are aware of where we are coming up short and we're actively prioritizing building those features to make them better. And we are trying to prove to other people that we can deliver. And when we say this will be live in two months, we're going to do it. And we're not like, building dumb things. We're, like, really just taking a ton of data points from what people are complaining about and being very realistic with ourselves of where we could be stronger and continuing to build in those areas. And so that's been a lot of our growth strategy.

How many you have partners? I assume so.

I have my two co founders and then our team's like 20 right now.

20. Oh, my God. What were your. When you chose your partners, did they have, like, complimentary skills or kind of like, why did you choose those partners? Or how did you guys come together real quickly? Yeah.

So my two co founders are Ben and Jake. So when I was At Morning Brew, 22 years old, we needed to hire another engineer. And Ben was the first person that I've ever hired in my life, so has a special place in my heart because, like, he was so much smarter and more talented than every other person I looked at. And he is, like a 10x engineer who's so creative. Oh, wow. And so I loved working with him.

How old is he?

Three years younger than me. Crazy. So really young. He's 26. Just had a kid yesterday. Congrats, Ben. Good man. So after working with him for two and a half years at Morning Brew, I knew, like, if I started a company, I wanted an engineer like him on my team. And then his. One of his best friends at school was also an engineer. And on my way out of Morning Brew, we brought in his best friend, Jake. And so when I went to Ben, I was like, ben, you're the smartest person I know. Like, I'm going to build this company. I want you to come. And he goes, well, Jake's the smartest person I know. I go, oh, that makes sense. So they're actually, I wouldn't say, like, as complementary. Like, they're both software engineers. I have a technical background, but I do more of like, the marketing and content and market type deal.

That's really cool. Okay. And they were just available or did they like.

I mean, they. They really raised this as a side project while they were working at Morning Brew. And then when we. I mean, again, like, we de risk this as much as possible. I waited till we had like the term sheet, sign and money in the bank before I quit my job and they quit their job to go all in.

Okay, so basically you were at Google working on the side, you got your friends to help you on the side, then you built this thing in 10 months, then you raised so you had like an MVP that was clickable, probably working, raised off that, then launched with strategic investors. You literally chose these people based on their ability to help you bring the tool to market. And then you had the viral loops built in from the start. Beehive is the domain, the links at the bottom. These people started using it and it just started growing from there. There was like no more marketing needed.

I mean there's so many small but like intentional things we did. So like all bu on like the insecurities of not having the most built out product. There's like the building of the features and like that whole niche. So there's product led growth is like the big thing, is like the term that everyone loves. But like literally like we didn't spend money for the first 12 months on growth. It was literally the links and the website and the newsletter and then building a narrative and letting our users know word of mouth.

Explain the narrative that you chose.

So the narrative was one like just the credibility of Morning Brews. Like the leading news that everyone knows.

And the Morning Brew in a box.

The team who built Morning Brew is now building a software narrative. So credibility is there. If you know nothing else but you look up or you've been reading Morning Brew for four years and you joined a company who's launching a newsletter. You're like, I wanted to emulate Morning Brew. And like the team behind Morning Brew just launched this other software platform. So that's a narrative. The other narrative is what we just talked about, which is the product led growth. Like we're just going to ship product that I know moves the needle for our users time and time again. So like if you're ever on the, let's say you do get pissed off with us and you're like, hey, we need something. The hope is in their mind they're, oh, they don't have this feature or it's not that great. But you trust the team based on how much. We've launched so quickly to date that we're aware that it's not a 10 out of 10 and that we're working on it. And if you continue to deliver like that one, it keeps the current users happy or believing that the features will come and will get better or it shows to the market that whatever we're missing will come. So that's like the other narrative. And then the third narrative is we are so growth focused. And with the referral program and the other features that we have, a lot of people start a newsletter and then they have success. They have 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 subscribers. And we have, like, a very. And this was actually not intentional per se, but like, the pink that we use and like our dashboard chart, it's very noticeable. And so people started screenshotting organically. Just hit 20,000 subscribers, screenshot of their chart. You see the pink chart and like, the milestone and like, one again, like, insecure. And like, I want one, I want to support that person. So I go, that's awesome. You hit 20,001. It feels amazing. As a founder, like, you built something on our platform. Like, I made a bunch of bets. Like, I think this feature would be valuable. I think people could benefit from this. Turned out to be right. You use them, and now you're 20,000 subscribers. Like, that's awesome. So I like it. And I retweeted because, like, that's great, and I want to support them. But what that retweet does then shows other people in my network and their network, like, look who's having success on Beehive. So it shows people hitting milestones and success and everything that the platform works. And then it also shows, like, oh, if I tweet my milestone, Tyler and the Beehive account are going to like it and retweet it. So then it encourages other people to say, okay, I just hit 10,000 subscribers. I'm going to tweet at Tyler or Beehive and show that I hit a milestone. So I like and retweet it. And this was, like, in retrospect, very intentional. But in the moment, I didn't have a master plan of, like, this is how we're going to do it.

It feels natural.

I was just like, oh, that's awesome. And again, it feels amazing as a founder that you took a huge bet and people are benefiting from the software we built. So I support them and I retweet it because it looks good for us, looks good for them. And before you know it, every time someone's hitting a milestone, which is now, like, dozens of people a day, they're tweeting at us. And the narrative that that builds is one, the software works, that you can grow really quickly and that everyone's moving to Beehive because all of These, A lot of these people didn't start a newsletter.

It becomes like the trend in this.

Newsletter community because they started on one of our competitors, whether it's like a legacy tech or the other players. And they made a conscious decision at some point to leave that and move to us. And now they're hitting milestones. So when you put it all together, the, the innocent bystander on Twitter sees like, constant milestones or like more and more people that launch newsletters on other platforms now having success on us. And the narrative is, one, everyone's moving to Beehive to send newsletters, and two, everyone's having success on Beehive. And like, that combination correlate it.

Like, people's newsletters are growing fast. They're on Beehive.

And then once I realized that, like, we've also had like five or six newsletters launch on Beehive and get acquired, like within a year, like Milk Roads. Like, probably the biggest example, they launched with no subscribers. Like, Ben Levy, Sean's partner, was like dming me, like, where to buy a domain, like, how to set it up and like the DNS stuff. So like literally from zero. And of course they have the benefit of having a large podcast distribution, but they took that to 250,000 subscribers in 10 months and flipped it for at.

A good time too.

For a good time, for a good amount of money.

Yeah.

And that narrative of you can go from zero to getting acquired for multiple millions of dollars on. And like, they didn't build like a custom flashy website like they built. They used our website. They had our branding on at the bottom of every single newsletter. They never asked to white label it. They sent using our custom templates and newsletters. They used our referral program led to like 50,000 subscribers of referrals on there. Like, it worked really well. It was a total proof of concept that you could come into our software with nothing but an idea, execute, not get super flashy. You don't need like custom websites with videos and NFTs and this. They just created content daily and sent it out and had a referral program and they sold it for millions of dollars. And so that's the big one.

I mean, that shows they were just the perfect time like the crypto bull run for sure. Every, like, perfect variable came together. Now AI is doing the same thing for you.

Now we have like a ton of.

And you're going to do every single year with every new trend.

But, but we have have so many. I think we have up to about 10 newsletters that started on us and have since been acquired. None as big as Milk Road, but, like, college students who are making, like, $50,000 to position Ton of money. And they were already making money through sponsorships as they were building. And then they got an acquisition of, like, 50K and they're like, a junior in college. And one. I think it shows the power of the newsletter economy. It's a huge proof of concept for us, but we've built that narrative as well. So, like, right, narrative. I think we've had, like, eight or nine people get acquired. And I just tweet. I, like, retweet the story with, like, the commentary of, like, can't believe another newsletter on Beehive got acquired.

I do not do sponsors on this podcast, so if you do learn something, the only thing I ask is that you send the link of this episode to a friend, if anyone wasn't clear on what he's talking about. When you have, like, you load your Beehive account and they have, like, this trademark, like, pink and blue, like, line chart of your growth, do you have, like, 1,000 subscribers the first month, 5,000 this month? It's like a line graph, and people will screenshot that and put that on Twitter, and then he'll retweet it and share it, and, like, cultivates this little community and this concept of sharing your growth. And then if you see that as a viewer, you start associating that to Beehive.

And it's also. It shows you, like, the power of distribution. Like, I'm doing this. When I started, I think I had, like, 2,000 followers on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it. I still, like. I think I have, like, 13,000 now. So, like, I'm not massive, but if you were to deploy the strategy with a significantly larger follower, like, base, like, that's incredible, right? So that. But that's why when you're talking about, like, as you're scrolling through Twitter, everything you see is, like, another person launching a newsletter. Like, I feel like I live on such a bubble of people hitting milestones on Beehive and, like, newsletters that are launching and making money and whatever. But it makes you think of, like, where else can we deploy this strategy to build narratives on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram? Because, like, yes, I'm sure there's, like, a pretty strong overlap of, like, Twitter people who are active on Twitter and people with newsletters, but I feel like it's, like, fairly limiting. And we're like, in the early Stages of deploying that narrative and content.

And really probably only in America. Like, yeah, globally. I can't even imagine what's to come, so.

And we do support a bunch of different international.

That's cool. All the different languages that you guys have. I listen, I heard that another podcast, that was a really cool idea. But the referral program is something that you guys are, like, kind of known for and trademarked. So I have two questions on this. Do you want to kind of explain how yours works? Because I know it's, like, only kind of for people that are also on your platform in a way, because not necessarily the referral program to help people grow their newsletter, that's pretty obvious, but kind of like that. I forgot what you called it. I'm so sorry. But when I have a newsletter and I can.

The recommendations.

Recommendations. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I can walk. Which one do you want me to walk through?

All of them?

Sure. So the referral.

Referral. Explain how you came up with them and then what they do.

Yeah. So the referral program going back to Morning Brew, very simply put, is you are incentivized as a reader to share the newsletter with other. So you read Morning Brew, you think it's great, you share it with your colleague at work, and then you get, like, stickers or like a premium newsletter or like a T shirt.

So is it credits or is it literally, like.

It's like referral credit. So if I shared it with my three coworkers with, like, my unique link, I get three credits and I can, like, redeem whatever, like a milestone for, like, a coffee mug. And so that is what led to. When I was at Morning Brew, over a million subscribers is basically saying, like, I already have a loyal audience. How can I make them share it where I don't have to, like, pay for growth? Facebook and Instagram, they're going to tell their friend, family, mom, dad, whatever. So we basically built that as a growth engine that anyone on Beehive can say, at these different milestones, we'll offer these different rewards. We don't do the fulfillment. We have, like, fulfillment partners, if you want to. But it's like the basic foundation of being able to offer that as a growth strategy for your newsletter. So that's like one growth strategy.

So if someone sends the newsletter and their friend signs up with their link, they get a point and they can use that point to buy or get a free mug.

Yeah. Or the point could be like a PDF, like what worked really for Milk Road going back to them at one referral you got a PDF explaining what like the top 10 crypto experts think about the market going into 2022. And I guess someone who signed up for Milk Road, like you're interested in crypto, you obviously are probably investing in crypto in some capacity. So for one referral to now get what 10 experts are telling you what to invest in. Like, I'd share it with someone for that.

And so your friends are probably interested in if they're your friend. So.

And what's super advantageous for Milk Road and any of these newsletters is like the digital products, like a PDF, like doesn't cost money to fulfill. So Morning Brew was like on one end of the spectrum where they were shipping mugs, T shirts, crew necks, whatever. Like it works and like it backs into a lot of ice. That's like. But we had interns at NYU and now I think they like have like a fulfillment center that actually does all of that. But like physical logistics is like a whole thing anyway, that's the referral program. The other thing that we did at Morning Brew was we would find other newsletters that had a similar audience demographic and say, promote Morning Brew and we'll promote you. It's like we'd be like, hey, we're each 50,000 subscribers. Big. It's like a free ad. Say, I start my day with Morning Brew. We'll plug your newsletter. We each grow from this. It costs $0. Me, we each get like four or five thousand subscribers.

Like that's a cross promotion.

Basically, it's a cross promotion. So then and then Morning grew bigger and bigger and we'd be like five times the size and it was like a cross promotion. But they'd plug us five times. We plugged them once and we, we did that game over and, and so it was always our game plan to launch a cross promotion network where you can find other newsletters that have a similar audience demographic but maybe not the same overlap. So maybe there's like a 2% overlap. So you're hitting net new people and you just want to. It's like a free house ad. It's a cross promotion. So the recommendation network is basically that you can find newsletters based on content category based on size, based on audience overlap and say, I like these three crypto newsletters, so I'm going to recommend them as well. The hope is that they see that they are drive or you're driving subscribers to them and like one click they can send subscribers back to you. So it's really just one big cross promotion. Network. So that's like step one of like another growth mechanism, like free to use on the platform and like you build like bubble. So a lot where it works best is five newsletters who are all like medium to large. All promote each other and they all go viral on LinkedIn or Twitter. And like they're the first to know that someone else in their pod is going viral. Because as soon as one person has a viral tweet and in the links it's sign up to my newsletter. Thousands of people sign up to their newsletter and through the recommendation network, those other three newsletters that he's recommending are now getting hundreds of subscribers for free.

And it's just one click.

It's one click. And so that's like the network effects of building a little pod and being able to grow for free. And again, like, it all goes back to Morning Brew. Like we saw the cross promotion network working.

These are the details that show that you like know this niche industry so well, where the mailchimps, the klaviyo might overlook it. Like there's like trying to send emails. Whether you're for a company, it's for a drip campaign, it's a newsletter. It all works where you're like, this is for newsletters. This is for growth. If someone reads this newsletter about AI, they're probably going to like these others. So let's let them cut deals. Where anytime someone subscribes to your newsletter, they have an agreement where you put your email here. If you like our newsletter, you'll probably like these three. Would you like to subscribe? Yes. Yes, yes. Now everybody's getting a new subscribe and.

A lot of people are only subscribing after they follow this person on Twitter or LinkedIn for a while. So they already like their content and they trust them. So you've already, you've been following this person on Twitter for months. They just launched a newsletter. You trust their recommendation. They recommend three other newsletters in that content space. You're probably going to opt into them. And now it's a free growth mechanism. And that's like where the credibility and experience of what we built at Morning Brew comes into play. Because I knew that cross promotions were like an incredible growth channel for Morning Brew for a while where we didn't have to pay for growth. And I also knew what newsletters we were looking at, what we were looking like, is it size, is it open rate, is it audience demographic? And building that directly into the product is something like, oh, we want to send emails. Like, there's a big difference between we want to send emails and we know what it takes to build a newsletter of 3 million people. And like it's the trial and error of that. We've done cross promotion for years and built that network that made it a no brainer to build it into our product.

This is going to be taking cross promotion to the extreme. And anyone that reads a newsletter only has so much time in the morning, so much attention. And so if they subscribe to 5newsletters, you're almost giving your newsletter subscribers to your competitor in a way because if they start making a better product than you, this person can only spend 20 minutes reading in the morning, they stop reading your newsletter. So I've always, because we've done this before and it seems like there's a balance, like you don't want to overdo it, you don't want to underdo it, but there's definitely value there. So what's your counter argument to that or what's your opinion on that?

I mean I think everyone's always worried about saturation to some capacity. One is you're usually pretty strategic of who you're recommending. So if it's the exact same audience and it's like a competing newsletter, most people like, we would never at Morning Brew do a cross promotion with like the Hustle. I was like, you were like our big competitors, like niche adjacent. It's like we're kind of targeting the same people. But you're writing about emerging technology and we're writing about AI prompts.

Gotcha.

So it's not like a one to one comparison. And if, and a lot of times it's like, hey, we do twice a week and you do weekly or like you kind of like, I mean you pick and choose who you want to promote. And so I think most people are savvy enough not to choose like a competitor to saturate their own audience. So that's like the main counter argument. But it's like up to you in general, like who you're recommending.

There's a very real hustle of like starting a newsletter or starting five newsletters in different industries, running them up to 100,000 people and then selling them like for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So have you seen since you've been so deep in this and I'm just so new, I always wondered now that these tools exist and they're so easy to beehive, does that lower the average value of a newsletter because they, they can grow more quickly but then that retention or the Churn is a little higher, Retention's lower, Churns higher. Because you can get them easier from that network.

Yeah. And I get what you're saying it.

Because, like, because Morning brew sold for $4 million or had 4 million subscribers. Sold for 75 million. Hustle sold for 25 million with a few million subscribers. So does that now, like, what is the KPI?

You're almost saying, like, it's becoming so easy to grow. It almost feels like a cheat code. Like, you go from 0 to 100k subscribers and are those 100k subscribers as valuable and engage Right. As it was in, like, the olden days where you were like, hustling and like spending a ton of money and converting people and there wasn't all of these growth.

Exactly.

I get what you're saying. I haven't seen like, a depreciation in like, the worth of a newsletter yet. I can see, like, it maybe getting there where if you're just cross promoting the same readers across the same newsletters. I'd also say, like, we have a.

Body newsletters at that point.

Yeah. I think what I don't want to misquote how many unique readers we have. Yeah, I'm completely blank.

You guys have all that data too?

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like, unique emails that we have across the ecosystem. And it's a lot. Right. So it's not that. Yes. I think we live in the small bubble of, like, this AI newsletter is now promoting this AI Prompts newsletter, which is. Was promoting this, like, emerging technology newsletter. The Internet's so big and there's so many unique content categories of, like, here's how you find freelance writing jobs in. In the Midwest. Or like, there's so many different newsletters and content categories that exist that in our small bubble, I think there's a lot of the same readers that have the same information died of. I read these five newsletters where you might see like, a diminished or perceived diminished value, but in the grand scheme of things, we have so many unique readers that are reading different types of content where. I don't think we've hit that point yet, but I think it's a good point to call out. Like, it just feels like functionally it's.

A huge benefit and it's on the owner of the newsletter to make due diligence there. But I can see people, like, as all people do, they take things to the extreme where they could just kind of like, abuse it to try to run up and get a valuation. So how did. I don't Know if you know this, but for Morning Brew, like, how did they choose 75 million? Like, it's not just off 4 million subscribers, it's more. Is it more so by like open rate, click through rate and then sponsorship revenue or like did they ever have internal products that they sold themselves? And it's that revenue? Because it can't just be off of number of subscribers.

Yeah, I mean it was definitely like a rev. They were large enough where like the revenue multiple was like a normal, like, I don't know, 2 to 4x revenue. Okay. So just also like caveat. I was not involved with any of the first talks at all. Like I left without even knowing that they were going to get acquired. So that was news to me when I woke up like my second week at Google and I was like, holy shit, Morning Brew just got acquired. That's kind of cool. But yes, I don't know, like the whole negotiation. But they were making enough revenue in the scale of like probably between 10 and 20 million where you can see the growth trajectory and get like a normal valuation.

So it's more so about the revenue the company's making and not the subscription number.

It's if you're not monetizing yet to go to a company and unless like so a great example, like I think the Hustle acquisition is so smart because they have a very particular demographic of readers. And if you're HubSpot and you're spending so much money on like solid media and acquisition to have a daily newsletter that people have built a habit around and have a brand association and instead of promote whatever for advertising revenue, just promote HubSpot because it's a large enterprise software solution that almost all 10 conversions a week and they're ROI positive and like they can keep scaling. So like I love that.

That makes so much sense.

That might be so that if you are that type of acquirer, like, it's probably a different equation for you where revenue doesn't actually matter as much. It's how engaged is the audience, how large is the audience, what's the growth trajectory, does that fit into my business? And if I'm a emerging AI business, I just need people to adopt my product and there's like a milk road equivalent in AI. Then it's like, okay, here's a brand that people trust. There's a habit because they read it every single morning, Monday through Friday. And instead of shilling other AI products, now they're only pushing people down funnel into our product. Then like, I don't give a shit how much money they're making. I just want that user base and I want to continue to grow if.

You have the context.

But if you're a media play, then it's probably revenue, right?

It's right.

If I'm paying a million dollars for this media asset because it's making $100,000 a year, I think in three years we'll be making more than a mil to mil.

It's just sponsors, cpm, whatever.

That's why newsletters are so powerful. It doesn't always have to be sponsorship. It could be pushing people into a paid community. Right? Well, maybe we have. If we're a product management newsletter, we can have a Slack channel or a Discord of 50 of the top PMs at Google, Uber, Facebook, Meta, Snapchat, whatever. And you can learn weekly from these webinars or like whatever it is, any type of funnel, like the emails are the ultimate top of funnel. And to have a product, whether it's like a paid community that people pay 99amonth to be a part of a Slack channel, like if you have a hundred thousand people reading your newsletter and trust what you say, the conversion rate of a few %, paying you $99 a month for a community is like a pretty great business. So that's why I think so many solopreneurs and side projects have been born of email. It all starts with creating amazing content. But if you can create good content and people are engaged, people are sharing, people are actively reading, what you do with that, you don't need to know day one, but year one, year two, you can launch communities, you can do paid subscriptions, you can do sponsorships, you can do affiliates.

So there's. What are the different types of newsletters that you've seen? Like, so it's like sponsorships, then you have your own products that you could sell through the newsletter. Then you have affiliate links promoting other.

People'S which are kind of just like what you can do, which are like bottom of and yeah, that's the other thing too. It's not mutually exclusive. Like you could launch a paid newsletter where people pay you $10 a month for like a bonus issue weekly, for example. But you could also have ads on the daily newsletters as well. Like they're not mutually exclusive. And so where substack made the big bet of we like. I think it sounds great to say you can own your audience. Like don't be reliant on ad dollars. It's very cyclical. You could, you have this direct relationship with your readers Already. Why not charge them 10, 15, $20 a month for premium content that is a higher level of quality or has additional insights which I think is great. And if you can warrant that, like I pay $12 a month to Ben Thompson certificate and I think it's great and I get value out of that. I think a lot of content creators found out that one. It's very difficult.

Yeah. The right really, really good content has.

To be good and can't be found anywhere else. Right. Like it's really hard to like Morning Brew and a lot of these other popular newsletters aggregate news around the Internet and their value prop is you don't have to read 20 different business sources all day long.

Curating. Yeah.

You are trusting our editors to compile and aggregate the most important topics of or of the week and break it down in consumable bits that are interesting to read. And that's great. But are people willing to pay for that? I'd say most likely not for like an aggregator type newsletter. So then it goes into like more expert analysis or inside tips. Whether it's like stock trading or crypto news or like other alpha you can get or just like really good entertainment that you would pay for. Kind of like in Netflix, but it's kind of harder to do that. I haven't seen that played as well.

That's interesting. I think a lot of people default to substack before Beehive existed because. Because it was easier to understand. Oh, I can charge 10 bucks a month for this newsletter and make money same time.

Only fans got very popular Patreon. It's the whole narrative and the market of Patreon.

Yeah.

Own your audience charge. Like why chase ad dollars? You can charge your readers who already love you and depend on your content to pay you 5, 10, 15, $20 a month. It makes perfect sense. But what you've seen with Art Hulu, what you've seen with Netflix, what you've seen with Disney is all of the direct subscription businesses are now offering advertising as well. Because one subscription is tough. And advertising, like where there are companies who want new customers, which is everyone, there's an advertising business to be had. And that's what all these businesses are starting to realize. And that's where a lot of content creators and newsletters understand that it's a lot of work to create a premium subscription offering. Not to be differentiated, it has to be quality. And I have to constantly annoy my audience to upsell them to pay for my premium newsletter. But advertising, granted, it's a whole Nother beast that a lot of them don't want to deal with. But if you can get advertising dollars, you skip a lot of that.

It has been the biggest headache for us running the newsletter. There was like no system you have to manage. Like, how do you find people that want to sponsor your newsletter? Your newsletter, Ours only been out for like five months. We have like 70,000 people on it. How much do we charge for a sponsorship? How do we find these legitimate companies to sponsor? We don't want to sponsor a scam. You have to vet them. You have to handle 15 conversations at once. You have to schedule out which sponsor goes out, what day. It's so much work. But I think Beehive is about to change that. And this is why I think that it's super. Probably the most valuable thing that I've heard you say is you guys are trying to make the Facebook ads platform of newsletters because as a solo creator, you don't want to deal with all that that I just mentioned for finding sponsors. But at the same time that you don't have to worry about Churn, you don't have to worry about pissing off your audience. You're not pushing anything on them so they still trust you. You can offer the newsletter for free so as many people can read it, but you just have a sponsor here to pay the bills for you. So go into what I think is going to be the most groundbreaking aspect of Beehive is your ad network.

And like to take a step back, Morning brew made their 15 to 20 million when they sold off of ad dollars. So the hustle was entirely, I think they had trends as well, but primarily ad based. Axios, ad based. So a lot of these newsletters that you are familiar with and have went on to sell were advertising based newsletters. And that's where a lot of the dollars go in content and media in general. And so I think you did a pretty good job of painting the pain points of as a publisher or newsletter writer, where do you go to find sponsorships? Do you actually understand your audience? Like who they are, what's the demographic, what are they more likely to click on, what ads are they interested in? So there's like audience development data that you need to do. You need to then find what brands they align with, what fits with your brand, who's the right person to get in contact with at these different brands, how do you price your newsletter? What are the expected results? And then you have to do the reporting, the invoicing, like it's a full Operation. Why the sales and brand partnerships team at Morning Brew was the largest team because there's so many moving parts to that. So I think the pain points on the newsletter side is pretty straightforward. You want to create a newsletter because you're creative, you're ambitious, you are good and interested in writing about something. You didn't create a newsletter to sell brand sponsorships. And so that's like the pain point on that side. On the other side, as the brand and the advertiser, let's say you have a large advertising budget and you're advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Google, YouTube, like the typical digital ad platforms, you now want to experiment with newsletters. You've done a few newsletter buys, it works really well. Let's say you're targeting women in their 30s. You find a massive newsletter like the Scam who targets that demographic. You pay them one upfront, like let's say $100,000 to run a single newsletter send because. And it's a big risk. It's like an all in one. Like I am purchasing a single send. Maybe it just so happens that day that the story above or below it is so engaging, it actually takes away clicks from me as the advertiser. Maybe the newsletter flops, maybe the open rate sucks. Like, there's a lot of risk involved with putting a lot of upfront capital into a single newsletter send. And those are like the downsides. I said, the upside, it goes great. And you want to advertise again in that newsletter, they might be booked up and like, you can't get another placement for another two months. You're like, okay, I found a newsletter that was primarily women in their 30s. It converted really well. We can't run in that newsletter for another two months. And it might, after we've run it two, three, four times, get saturated with that exact same audience. So then your problem becomes, where are there other newsletters that are similar to that? And so where do you look for these newsletters? So now you're like googling what newsletters do women in their 30s read? What are newsletters similar to the Scam? And now you have a list of like 15 to 20 different newsletters. I have to find the people at those newsletters, but haven't thought about, hey, or are you accepting advertising? I haven't seen an advertisement in your newsletter. Would you be open to that? Let's get in contact with the right person. So much outreach. So you're like, now there's someone on that marketing team that is doing all this outreach to newsletters. And then when you get in contact with the newsletter like you're like, you're just trusting their data of you're like okay, so like how they lie, how, how big is your newsletter? They go like 100k and like okay, well like what's the open rate? Like I don't know, like is it unique opens, is it total opens? Do you trust their data? Do you ask them for like a screenshot of like hey, let me see your dashboard. How, how actually how big is your newsletter? What's your open rate? What's your click through rate? And then you also ask like who's your audience? And to be honest, like email is so opaque. It's just like an email. Someone@gmail.com they don't know who their audience is at all. So you're trusting these random newsletters that you found on a Google search that have a similar demographic maybe and you're trusting their numbers, their audience and, and there's only so many that you're going to find it's very manual. So as the advertiser, which I think actually might be the bigger pain point is if I know that I want to advertise and diversify away from meta, Facebook, Google and newsletters have worked really well for us because newsletters are typically very niche audiences where you trust the person. You've been following them on Twitter, you follow their, you follow them on social, you sign up to their newsletter, you trust the products that they're putting in the newsletter. That's why it performs really well. And now you want to get in front of a bunch of different newsletters. Where do you go to do that? And the solution would be on our platform saying you want to put $100,000. And rather than it being one big newsletter buy, we would actually diversify your spend across like 30 different newsletters. We have all the first party data of who the subscribers are, what they've clicked on historically. So we know that this person always clicks on CNBC and Yahoo Finance link so they're interested in finance and investing. They also click on NBA link so they're interested in NBA and a bunch of like right leaning politics stuff. So they're like a Republican that's interested in the NBA and investing and with their IP address and location like are located in the northeast. So now we have like a huge like customer profile on these different readers.

Because I would never see that if someone subscribed to my newsletter. All I know is that person is subscribed to my newsletter. But since they're subscribed to my newsletter on your platform. You can see what other newsletters they're also subscribed to on your platform.

So using our platform, you can collect data yourself. And you do see like location data. You see, like if you ask them their favorite sports team, like, that's data that you own. You can export it. You can see that on charts. What you can see is what the other newsletters on our platform are collecting. So we kind of have like a.

That would benefit us, that would benefit.

You, because now we know who your audience is outside of you. So we can get you better advertisers, better rate and they'll perform better. So they'll keep dishing you more money. And so now what we've solved is the pain point of newsletters where you don't have to go out and go to like the 15 brands that you think might advertise in your newsletter and then pitch someone your newsletter and spend a ton of time doing that because it's a total pain in the ass.

Like YouTube for you.

Like my we're dishing you ads. We're saying you're creating your newsletter. You have five open ad opportunities. Here's the five advertisers, here's the copy. Which one do you like the most? And you'll get paid approximately 2000 for that, 1500 for that, whatever. And you choose which one aligns with you the most and you pick it. And there's no obligation or contract. Like, you don't need to promise us that you're going to run these ads. So that is totally up to you. And you also might have your own brand deals where you have your own advertiser and you can say no to all of ours and make more money with your own. And that's totally fine. Like, we are in the camp of we want our newsletters to make as much money as possible and grow as fast as possible. And whether you use our ads or your own ads, whatever you want to do, like, we're in favor of helping you do that.

It's there if you want it and.

It'S there if you want it. And if you don't want it, don't take it. And then on the flip side, as an advertiser, you can get front of thousands, tens of thousands of the top newsletters in the world and be placed because of first party data. And it's just like you're hitting a long tail of content creators. Like you'll hit newsletters that, that maybe have 500 subscribers that you have no business even going to that because it's too small for you. But if we hit 30 newsletters of 500 subscribers, it actually adds up to impressions. I can move the needle.

Yeah, because all you care about, it doesn't matter. You don't care if it's just one newsletter. 500. You just want 30,000 impressions. 30,000 impressions is a dense audience of 500 people. So.

And you can go to a newsletter of 30,000 subscribers which might convert. Okay, but what if there's like 60 newsletters, 500 subscribers, super dense, really like passionate audiences that are going to convert so much higher. Like and it'll perform so much better for the advertiser, but it's just too much of a time commitment for any that you never to do at any $30. So like if done right, there's like a lot of big data play and there's like a lot of filters and functionality to be built. But if done right, it really is a win, win, win for the advertisers to hit audiences that are very engaged at scale for newsletters to get monetized and make money without having a sales team, without having to deal with the copy creation, the branding, the, the invoicing, the reporting. And then a win for us obviously because we are building this marketplace.

Rip to newsletter ad agencies or it becomes like way more available to be a newsletter ad agency. It's like a Facebook ad agency now.

Right. Like we would ideally, like the newsletter agencies, ad agencies would be a customer of ours and bring their clients on and it makes their job so much easier. Right. So similar to like a Facebook ad manager agency as well.

I don't like, I think that is the most genius thing possible in the space. Has anyone ever tried it before?

So no is I'll say a few things. There is traditional pixel based ad networks that exist in email that are really shitty banner ads.

Well you have UTM links where people can track the conversion rates like so.

That you will go full funnel, have pixels on like the advertisers website and actually track conversion of everything. So like when I say like Facebook Ad manager for literally letters, like that is where we're going on like the five year horizon. There's been players that have banner ads and email newsletters that don't convert well and cost pennies and those have been around for a while. That being said, multibillion dollar businesses, like there's a lot of money there, like there's a lot of emails being sent in the world and they're so low effort they Drop in a pixel and now you're monetizing and you don't have to deal with anything as the newsletter. So that exists. But like data is very limited, right? Like we own the entire ecosystem from where the content creators are creating content to where the data is populating because of what's. Who's opening, who's clicking, who's saying that their favorite sports league is the NBA. Like we have all of the data end to end so we're in like a very unique position to do that. That so there are like players in like the email ad space that have taken an agnostic view with pixel based banner ads. And then there's a few competitors that have experimented since I have been talking about this and saying that this is what we're building, that they have tried that.

Good for you for talking about.

But the different advantage is like this has been the game plan day one. So we were collecting data and building tools and infrastructure day one knowing that the ad network was always the end play. If you were to ask me, it sounds like a lot less sexier. But like as a capitalist, probably more optimistic of like day one we're building the largest and network in email. But like how do you get there and how do you make it the most beneficial to newsletters and advertisers is I think you have to own the system end to end and not just be a pixel based 100%. So how do you get there? You have to build the best newsletter platform where it attracts all the top newsletters to use your software. So it is like a very intentional stepwise process of saying like in order to build the biggest newsletter ad network that exists, you need to have billions of impressions and emails being sent, which means you need to have tens of thousands of the top and largest newsletters using your software, which means you need to build all of the kick ass features that attract people to grow and monetize on your platform to have newsletters move over to then monetize those assets. So it's like kind of like playing chess in a way. But like that was always the end goal and we're still executing in like the first inning of just building like the core foundational tech that attracts newsletters to launch and start on our platform.

Words can't describe how smart I think that is and how needed it is. Because sponsorships are a better, they're better for the audience because you can grow, make the free newsletter. You get as many people to get free value and it's just a sponsored post that people are used to. But the pain point has always been organizing for the everyday person who's not an entrepreneur. Now you don't need to make a product, you don't need to charge 10 bucks. Your newsletter, which people churn out of or it loses trust with your audience unless you're like specifically detailed. And so if you could literally just take out that whole pain point of having to organize ads for the newsletter side, genius. And from the ad side, equally as convenient. And so you had that plan from the start. And so it was literally your first plan was like, I guess it's phases. Phase one, launch with core functionality and a referral program. The referral programs are Advantage plus, easy to sign up and viral loops that'll lead to product LED growth. Then you're going to add the boosts. The boosts? Yeah, add the boosts, make the product better, grow a community, engage with the community, deliver on your promises, constantly iterate or constantly develop new features and then let them know every single week, share their progress, what is it? Celebrate their success. And then ultimately once you have enough users, you have that critical mass of people, you have the data of all the people signing up, then you have this custom Facebook ads.

And so now we're 19 months in, we're doing 400 million impressions a month. And like that's enough to turn to an advertiser or like an agency and say we have some of the top publishers, content creators, influencers in the world in AI, crypto, fashion, sports, politics. If that's an audience that you want to get in front of, you could.

Do it internally, manually.

So that we are doing it manually to start. And so to date, I mean this will change very soon. But to date like you can run an ad agency without the tech. So we know our top, we have all the data, we know who our top newsletters are, we know their conversion rates, we know their click through rate, we know what advertisers and advertisements have performed better historically. And so we don't need the tech per se to be built day one. And it also allows us the wiggle room to learn from like what the newsletters want want, what pain points they have when inserting the ad, what the agencies and advertisers are looking for. So it really is like building the plane while you're flying it in the sense of like why go heads down and build the entire infrastructure and tech that I just described, like super tight when we can like build like the core foundation, then do it manually for a bit, see what advertisers want. They're like, hey, we really need this data. Or like this is the demographic data that moves the needle for us. Or we need real time reporting. And then it's like, okay, well we haven't invested and wasted time building XYZ off the wrong assumptions. Now that we have this feedback, we're going to spend the next month building that. And I'd say we're, I mean, Ben just had a kid yesterday, so we're a little delayed. But the goal would be in the next month or so to roll out like in platform ad opportunities and like really make it real.

Okay. You are creating like a new make money online opportunity. And this is like kind of what my audience and my world is on. YouTube is a newsletter ad agency. If you're listening to this, you're a 1622 year old kid hustling, looking for a way to make money online. Go learn beehive and learn how to make beehive ads for newsletters. Everyone is talking about Facebook ads, everybody's talking about social media marketing. You've probably never heard of newsletter ads. We run a newsletter. Our ads are making us a lot of money. These companies are selling for hundreds of millions of dollars. So if you can figure out how to run ads on newsletters on their network now that's going to be a huge agency opportunity where you're just connecting advertisers to newsletters. You can convince YouTubers to make a newsletter, say it's going to make you an extra $5,000 a month and then set up and run their ads manager for their newsletter and you can take a cut of that or charge a monthly retainer. I've never thought about that. That is so, so cool.

I mean that's also been one of the coolest things in this journey of seeing businesses built off of our business around your eco. That's so cool. So we now have a lot of agencies specific to beehive that help you set up your beehive account, build your landing page, build your newsletter, automate it. We have like growth strategies. So someone who knows, okay, I can run Facebook and Instagram ads for your newsletter, but I can also tie that in with the recommendation. I know which newsletters are better for recommendations. We can put a little budget into the boost network. We can put some budget into this. We can have like SEO optimized content. We can have a pop up form and email gate certain posts, we can drive traffic to that and like by really knowing the content ecosystem and all of the tools that we've built like we have hit the point, which I knew we would get is where we're almost too feature rich, where it's like a new car, it becomes like a little overwhelming. You're like, that's how I felt. So we're building resources now. We're building like a Beehive 101 resource.

Where we've got a lot of good ones though. Like the core function, it's a little convoluted.

Like we have a YouTube channel.

Yeah.

We have a blog, we have Zendesk articles. Like we have a knowledge base but we don't have like a here's everything you would need to know and you can pick and choose what you want to learn outside of like the YouTube tutorials. We also ship too quickly where the YouTube tutorials. Like the UI goes out of date in like two months. Like we completely revamped the page so we're building a Beehive 101 resource. But I say that because now we offer so much, which is great. So when people are like, hey, can you do X on Beehive? The answer used to be no to 9 out of 10 things. Now it's yes to 9 out of 10 things. Which is great and empowering and allows people to launch more products and features. But it also means to the new users it's very overwhelming. And so we now have businesses and agencies built on top of Beehive that we are either somewhat associated with or not at all. Or they will help you grow in the on Beehive. They'll help you set up better looking newsletters, templates, websites, newsletter growth agency would.

Be or a great business. Isn't that. Didn't you guys just partner with the guy that you just.

Matt. Matt Gary. Yeah, so we just. That's like our first like a partnership and he does growth in ads and he worked with like the Milk Road and a bunch of other content creat. But there's also like just setting up my account to make sure it works well. There's like customizing the newsletter template. There's customizing the website and then there's growth. There's design. There's so many different components of what you're building here. And there's like an agency opportunity to specialize in either all of them or in any individual vertical.

That's so smart because we like literally I keep saying it, but we started our newsletter five months ago and we've been running Facebook ads. We did Facebook ads for like our whole life. And so we're like getting 75 cent signups and just killing it over there. And then we're just learning all these different ways to market newsletters and grow them. And I think this is our first month of doing sponsors and we have like 12k lined up for the first month. And so anybody can just go to a YouTuber like me. We just happen to know what we're doing. But most YouTubers don't go to someone like me, say, hey, we'll start you a newsletter, we'll make you an extra based on your audience. I bet you get 50,000 people. We'll make you an extra $10,000 this month and don't do anything.

There's also a huge business for like ghost writing. Yeah, we'll transcribe your videos and youtubers who just are like, like, like someone who's a youtuber and amazing at creating like five minute videos that are super entertaining and they're like, I don't give a about writing. Like that's not my skill set. But I have a million subscribers on YouTube. I bet you I can convert 5 to 10% of them to a newsletter. And now you're saying I can monetize on my YouTube channel like automatically with like the adsense. But I could also make 10k, 12k a month on my email newsletter. Why not spend 3k in a ghostwriting.

Service who will do like a done for you newsletter? We'll write it, we'll do the beehive, we'll grow it it and we'll get the sponsors for you easy.

And so I think that's a huge opportunity and there's like a creative agency play too. They, they get the sign off of the creator, the creators like, okay, this content works for me. It fits my brand. It's, it's based off of the content I'm already creating on YouTube. They sign off, you get some trust back and forth and now you basically have a newsletter in a box that you're making 15, 20, 25k a month on and you're paying the service and the agency 5K.

It's a no brainer. You're immediately adding value and making them money they didn't know existed. Like I never thought a newsletter would be a real thing I would do six months ago.

And but what they also don't realize too is like as that newsletter gets better and better and scales, you're going to get people in the newsletter ecosystem that aren't even on your YouTube ecosystem. And at the bottom of every newsletter when you're like in the booth, hey, subscribe to my YouTube channel now your.

YouTube channels, you're cross pollinating.

So that's like the real money maker that I think we're about to enter in with a few different partnerships.

I just got so much energy that just got me so excited. I've been making all these videos on like AI automation agencies, but now I'm going to make one on newsletter agencies. Guys, I'm just trying to show you opportunities but this, I've never thought about that. And that's like, makes so much sense because you immediately make them more money and then grow their audience. It makes so much sense. So wow, fantastic business you have here, brother. Pretty cool, pretty cool shit. But I do want to ask you what makes the business work? Like how the software tools you guys are using internally, how are you actually like operating the business?

So we're 100% remote, which is I, I'm a huge fan. I used to be such an office person, like morning brew days. I love going in, love the cold brew, love talking to people, of socializing, love happy hour. And I was the grumpiest person in the world when like Covid first hit off because I was like in New York, tiny apartment, didn't have a place to work. I was like working on my couch with my computer on my lap. And now I flip to the 180 where I can't imagine spending any time commuting. I wake up, I go to the gym, I come back and I'm at my desk working from like 8am to 10pm And I don't know if everyone on the team is working to that extent, but the fact that we can hire talent from around the world. We have engineers in the Netherlands, we have people in India, Canada, Mexico, Colombia. So we have a global team. We're 20 now, we're primarily engineering and we have like a pretty well oiled machine I'd say because like we've been so intentional about strategy. And the one thing that I think I do pretty well as a leader is very, very, very transparent communication. And so everyone's on the exact same page of this is what's working really well. This is where we're kind of shitting the bed in the business. This needs to get a lot better. And here's like our vision for the next quarter, for the next month, for the next week. And we all are rowing in the exact same direction. And it's been like a huge part of the success is really hiring talented people and having us all on the same page. Everyone's in their own workplace, everyone's comfortable, everyone's hustling, everyone's bought in.

I think most companies are stuck in their ways or most new companies see how other companies are ran. So they think that's how they have to do it. You have to have an office, you have to have everybody here. But it makes way more sense to just hire in any country if this person's skilled, good at the job, doesn't matter about time zones. You have zoom, you just have a trello board or whatever to list out your sprints and everyone's on the same page. There is no real reason, I think.

It'S so archaic to think that we're gonna have an office in Los Angeles. Everyone has to hire people in la. We would not be anywhere where we are if I only had talent from Los Angeles.

You're like actually at a disadvantage because you have to overpay people. You have to pay to move them there and then you have way more. In my opinion, it's going to cause like human problems. You have more need for management and like HR.

We just brought on our first agent. Yeah, person. But like that was like higher 20, right. So like, I don't know as a remote, I mean there's a lot of things that need to be done with HR in terms of like for sure all in processing with that onboarding and recruiting, which I'm now learning now how much I was like had on my plate that I shouldn't have. But yeah, I mean I fundamentally. Just because I've only had so many jobs, but I think like having paying someone to relocate to a different city and like uprooting like their spouse's job and like kids in schools and everything is like the craziest concept. Not to mention just like requiring people like limiting your talent pool to a single location that can drive to an office that you're now paying for this office as well. Like I sound like such a millennial talking like this, but I fundamentally cannot comprehend why anyone would choose something differently. I talked to other startups and entrepreneurs who are building companies and they always like, how do you, how do you know people are getting shit done? I was like, well one, everything's, everything's very performance based. Right? I think a lot of it stems from the fact that we are engineering based. And so here's the expectations of the two weeks. Like this feature does not exist today. It needs to exist by the end of the week. Week. And this person's tasked to get it done and it either gets done or it doesn't. And if someone continues to not get something done. It's very obvious we do daily stand ups. So you say what you've been working on and you say what you're working on today and it becomes very apparent when someone isn't pulling their weight and when the team is so high caliber and everyone else is pulling their weight. I think like human psychology, like you don't want to be the person who should stand up and be like, honestly didn't get much done yesterday and like I hope I can get this done today.

Whether you're in person or online, right? It made sense like 30 years ago you could literally only do a, a one to one phone call with a telephone that was connected to your wall. Like you had so like it made sense to pay someone 20 grand that's talented to move out there and they.

Would uproot their family confronted being busy with getting shit done. And like that's the big difference too. Like we have an expectation of by the end of this sprint or the end of this week, these things that don't get exist are going to exist and here's who's going to do them. And like there's no excuses. Like that is what's. That is the output of the week and if you can get it done in less time then good for you. And like you can watch Netflix if you want.

But like, like you shouldn't punish people for being good at their job if.

You are good enough. But the thing is we also have hired people with such a ownership mentality they've, they finished stuff early and they're like what else can I do? Who can I unblock? And like it's like setting that culture and being very intentional early on. That's made it a no brainer to hire a remote team.

So I'm assuming you do that on Zoom. That's how you manage or we're, we're.

Google Meets team actually. We don't, we don't pay for good.

You got an affiliate link. Okay.

My ex employer actually.

Yeah. Okay, fair enough. That actually makes sense. Okay, so what else do you use? Like what's your tech stack? What like management project management tools are using. Are you using Slack?

Yeah.

Every single tool you use.

Yeah. Yeah. So Slack's hq, right? So that's like the main thing. I think you have to be really careful about Slack too as a remote team because I think again going back to people conflating busy with getting shit done, like it's really easy to slack people all day. I'm like a huge like deep work like focus nerd. Because I get very little of that. And so I try to instill that on the team of it's actually annoying as shit when you slack your co workers 15 times for every little thing that happens.

Like, you need to turn it off, like, three hours.

I don't. Yeah, I don't have, like, the numbers in front of me, but the whole context switching and how much time it takes away from getting stuff done every time you get distracted, like, adds up a ton throughout the day and throughout the week. So I caveat all that with, like, yes, we use Slack. Yes, it's our central tool for communicating. Yes, it gets annoying. And I try to, like, from a culture standpoint, be very intentional of when people should be slacking and when it can wait to a meeting. Which leads us to our next tool. We use Google Meets. We're like a very meeting, light team. And that's also very intentional. One I hate meeting. I like, I'm not someone who feels productive in meetings. I'm someone who feels productive with a to do list of here's the 10 things I need to do this week outcome and checking them off and getting them done. Like people management. I know, like a CEO. Like, yes, I manage people, but, like, I'd rather give them the autonomy to make their own decisions and deliver results.

That's what you call an ownership mentality.

Is that for sure? Yeah. Yeah.

Explain the difference of that between other companies that you'd say.

I think there's a difference. One, like, in startups, especially smaller startups, when you have equity in the company and like, the upside is financially large for you for it to be successful, there's also, like a small team culture and component of, like, us against the world. There are so many larger competitors and it's like, fun. Like, there's like, I would say most people on the team sign up, like, sign in in the morning and like, genuinely have fun at what they're doing. And that's because we have so many touch points with our users, people. Like when Milk Road gets acquired, like, there are so many features that the engineers built that that Milk Road plugged into that contributed to their success. And seeing that you spent two months building, like, the referral program feature or like the custom website or the custom newsletter formatting, they took advantage of it. Then they sold their business for many millions of dollars. And now everyone's praising One Milk Road to Beehive as a platform and then knowing that you had a part, either unblocking them on, like, the customer service side or building the actual tools that help them succeed. Like, it's a really cool, tangible feedback loop. And so the more feedback loops and touch points you can get to your, like, early employees, the more they feel a part of the journey. And so when they're done working on like 4 or 5pm and they're like, but I could launch this additional feature.

Yeah.

Because I saw on Twitter this one user just bitching about this all day long, and it'd be really cool. And I have the power to fix their problem, solve it, and then DM them or tweet like, hey, we just fixed that for you. And they get that touch point. And so many of our engineers take the ownership to go out of their way and be like, hey, I was like, on Saturday, I was on Twitter, saw this person, said, like, it'd be really cool if you did this. So Saturday night I spent an hour, I built that feature. I tweeted at them that that's now available. And now you have like, a lifelong fan in that Twitter person.

Yeah.

And that person on Twitter. And like, people see that, they retweeted and they're like, that's like real customer obsession. And like, that's the. The autonomy and ownership I give all of our employees to take advantage of.

I feel like it's just the difference of milestones or, like, accomplishing an outcome or doing a task compared to you have to be here from 8 to 5 or 9 to 5, like, and you have to figure out stuff to do even if you don't think there's anything to do.

I'd say there's like an extra step too. There's like the. I just show up because I get paid on salary to be there from nine to five.

Do the bare minimum.

That's the bare minimum. And that's where people get worried. Like, how do you know they're not just, like, playing video games or, like, on Netflix all day? And, like, if that's the kind of job and work environment you have, like, that's what you're going to get. There's like, the next step, which I alluded to, which is more milestone based. Like, here's the expectations. And I'd say we even go one step beyond that of, like, we're building something bigger here and you have equity and are financially invested in one, like a career trajectory and opportunity to build something really cool. Like, ideally, people look back at. Or you look back in 10, 15 years of your. At your time at Beehive, and you're like, we had something special we were surrounded by 10, 15, 20 of the smartest people I've ever met. We were in a very competitive industry where everyone had more money than us, everyone doubted us. We had so many investors say no. But like, every day I woke up and I got to build something awesome. Users got to use my tech, I got to see how they used it, the success they had because of it. And like, really building something that means something is like the evolution more than like, hey, the expectation is you're getting shit done, the expectation is you're getting things done, but you're also building and genuinely excited and interested to provide the value that you're providing because you're a part of this trajectory in team and this story. And so that's like where we are. And it was like very hard. But it's also because I think it starts with like me being obsessed with one success and our customers and our users and trying to provide value. The early co founders having that same passion. And like, every one person we hired saw that and like, you don't want to be the person who joins the team and it's like just going to clock out when I can.

But it also even that like, it's kind of if. What if they want to play video games and they're just, they've been doing this one skill for 10 years and they're very fast at what they do do and you have all these different things that you need them to do and they can do them in like one or two days and then there's not really anything else they can do until everybody else on the team's done. So it's almost like an incentive for them to be good at their job, get it done really quickly. It's like the idea that you want to hire lazy people because they're going to find the way to do something as quickly as possible.

And like, I'm not saying like you have to devote your entire life in every waking moment, like I do to it's do what you need to do. And I think if we like, I find it really interesting and really cool when an engineer who typically, like, if you're part of a large corporation, you build a feature, you make some dashboard a little bit quicker so finance can use this tool. And like, you hear from like Janice and finances, she's really happy you built that tool. And like, that's awesome. But like, when you spend three weeks building a feature that we know is going to provide a ton of value to newsletters, it's like our hunch is like this is going to be really valuable and well received. You've been heads down building this for three weeks. Meticulously we launched it, we see hundreds of signups and like upgrades on the day that we launch that feature because everyone's super interested. So like the hunch was correct. Then people start using the tool that you just built. And like along the way as the engineer you made so many small assumptions of like, what if I move this over here? What I think this would be really cool. And now you're seeing all of those decisions pay off in real time and you see the product adoption from like the dashboards and event tracking. And then you also get to see people on Twitter being like, like bi just launched this amazing feature. Like it's so cool. And like now I just, I launched it today. Now my website looks better, now I'm converting 10% higher. So now I'm making more money. Like as the engineer who just spent three weeks of your life building that, like how rewarding is that?

It's a great incentive and you have skin in the game.

And so finding ways to have every employee, like the engineering example is easier to do. But even customer success, someone like has a bad experience, you're able to turn that around, provide such excellent support, give them an extra like 30 days for free and they become a lifelong advocate. And then now that person who came in super angry and customer support is tweeting like, yo, I love beehive. Best experience I've ever had. Shout out to the person on their support team. Like there's so many touch points that you can create with our users where you feel very bought into what we're doing and the journey and like that's my main job is really just getting people who are passionate and want to be a part of that journey and who can excel in that environment where I'm not going to give you like super strict outline milestones or tell you what to do every day. You know what the end goal is. Like we need to grow faster, we need to make this better. We need to do X, Y, Z. You kind of fill in the gaps and it's up to you to kind of execute. And there's like a lot of autonomy. I think a lot of it stems from like my experiences too. Like I over index on hiring people that are scrappy and like don't have like they didn't go to an Ivy League school. I mean they can't. But didn't go to an Ivy League school. Maybe they're self taught. Like someone who self taught themselves a skill and like stayed up very late on YouTube for months teaching themselves. Whether it's digital marketing or coding. That's someone that I'd rather bet on. It's a personality than someone that you can't teach grit and drive. And I'd rather bet on someone who has less of the accolades and like polished resume but has so much more drive and intangibles like that. Because that was me.

Me. That's interesting because think about the people like the intrinsic motivation to go to do the work to get into Harvard. Like you are, you are doing the work to get an external validation to get that title because that's a status symbol and that would same thing would translate to okay, you go to Harvard, then you get a job at Facebook as a senior engineer or whatever it is. And so it's like a different type of motivation. You're doing it for the title or.

Possibly for the status maybe.

Yeah.

So yeah, I feel like for like brand names. Like, like also I'm nothing against Harvard or Stanford. Like I'll hire from those school too. Like I don't care.

But it's a different psychology because then the person that's learning on you're going.

For the stamp of approval versus when you're building something YouTube, like YouTube doesn't even give you a badge for studying those things. It's like a very utilitarian. Like I want to get better at this and no one's going to recognize that I am better than that. But my performance and my understanding of it when I apply to a job or build my own side hustle or business, like it will be on full display because I learned that skill and like it's not on my resume. There's no like flashy badge. Like I don't get any sort of accolade. I just want to get better at something. And like also like the school track from high school to college is one thing and like you're just kind of on that track to spend nights and weekends going out of your way because you're genuinely interested or motivated I think shows like a different level of drive. So I'm not taking away from college education but I, I've realized in retrospect playing like like armchair therapist, like some of the things that I do or value is really from like my experience. Like I will bet on the person who just graduated but is so hungry. And it's very apparent over someone who has been in this role for 10 years at like XYZ. Reputable company thinks they know what they're doing because like they don't have, maybe they do have that drive. And like I'm over generalizing now, but I love the grittiest, like people who want to show that they're willing to put in the work and they have a, they have a chip on their shoulder and a lot to prove because that is still me to this day, but definitely me like six years ago. And then also like going back to what I said about my days at Morning Brew, like Austin and Alex didn't tell me every day what to do. I knew what the end goal was and they were like, figure it out and hopefully you deliver.

Yeah.

And so that, that's like I thrive so much in that environment and so I've kind of emulated that unintentionally of like our head of growth. I've never told him what to do. He just knows we need to grow faster and quicker and so he knows what that means and it's up to him. But I'm not like saying here's like the 20 things we need to get done this week speak. And that type of management style, one I think is easier in a sense where I'm not as hands on and micromanaging. But it's also more rewarding to the people that are reporting to you.

So you incentivize them and you find people that default to action if they don't have something to do, they default do something.

I think that's one of our values that we did way back. It's like some bias towards action. Yeah.

Yeah, that's good. I saw that some video somewhere. And same with Elon Musk. He like doesn't look at. This is probably some cliche video of him, but it's like he doesn't look at your school you went to. He asks what exceptional results have you had had. And that's kind of how he judges who to bring on his teams. Never like some title or accolade. That's really insightful. Okay. But back to what we were actually talking about.

Yeah, tools. That, that was great.

Tangent.

10 minute tangent off slack. So I was going to say Google Meet. Google Meet like for video hangouts.

But don't use it a lot. So Google Meets. Don't use it a lot. You have slack limit it.

Try to limit it. Yeah, very meeting. Like partially because we were primarily, I think our first five out of seven hires were engineers. So it's like engineering. There's like just heads down, build stuff and get. So like we, we talking every day.

Is not going to solve anything.

So other tech stack, we use Linear for project management. Like it's engineering based. So it's, it's like set up the GitHub beautiful UI. I'm a huge linear Stan, so I'll promote that all day. So that's like engineering based tickets like typical Kanban or Kanban, whatever the hell you say. Like the board of moving things from like backlog to do progress testing, QA production. So we use Linear for that. For non engineering related initiatives, use Asana for project management. So for growth initiatives, for content, for SEO. Anything else that's not engineering, we use Asana for project management. What else do we use? We use Zendesk for support. Our actual tech stack is Ruby on Rails. So like that is what I learned. What Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails is like the. Is that like a coding language?

Wow, that's so crazy. Yeah, it was the like very like it's what Twitter used to be built and I doubt it is but like way back when it was built on Twitter, Airbnb, Shopify are like the big tech companies that were built on Ruby on Rails. Now I think they're either on that or use microservices, but that's what I was taught or like taught myself and coding language or it's like a coding language framework. The language is Ruby. So like Python.

I'm not technical.

Yeah, I'm a YouTuber. You told, you told me you wanted to go deep on text. Oh, I like it though. So the coding languages are like Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Java.

So Ruby is.

Ruby is a language.

I've heard of Java. I've heard of Python.

Yeah. Ruby on Rails is the, the framework that creates everything. So we use Ruby on Rails website which at the time, like I said, Airbnb, Shopify, Twitter, it was like the hot framework. I think that those times have passed because as we've gone to hire more people are like, oh, we don't really use Ruby much anymore. So if you use Ruby on Rails, apply to our jobs. So that's like our like primary tech stack, GitHub for code repositories. I don't think what else we use.

For Zendesk for customer support is that just like email management so everyone can see the emails. Is it like Instagram, dms, Twitter?

This is kind of like a platform that'll manage. You can, you can submit a support ticket through the platform. Hey, my website appears to be embedded.

On BI's website though.

We have like an API where you can send information and we have a support team that has like, okay, you have a hundred unanswered tickets of people complaining about xyz. We help unblock and solve their problems.

So multiple people on the team can see those same requests in one place.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, where do you. When people, like, when customers wanted to give you feedback early on, how did they do that? Was it just like a support email in the bottom of the website?

A lot of it's like Twitter and it was like, one of the key advantages I've had and also one of my downfalls is like, I've made myself way too available. So I answer, you replied to our.

Team'S email when we signed up. Yeah. Five months ago.

Yeah. Like multiple times.

Immediately I respond to you.

Yeah, I respond to every Twitter, DM, LinkedIn, DM. Like, I'm very available. 1. Again, a lot of it comes with the anxiety and insecurities of an early startup founder being like, what alpha can I get from users? The second someone's like, hey, this isn't working, I want to make sure I see that. I think we've moved past the, like, code red. Something isn't working in most cases. So it's. If something's not working well or can be better, rather than them going to Twitter, complaining about it, or, you know, churning to another platform, I want them to come to me and say, hey, I'm thinking about out XYZ features would really be a difference maker for my newsletter. I want that insight all day long. So it's honestly just like, free. Customer discovery is like, the very optimistic way of looking at making your DMs available. The pessimistic way of looking at it is it's another customer support channel. So when I open Twitter, I'm not like, oh, I'm so excited to check Twitter. It's how many DMs do I have that could be support issues, could be someone complaining about something. So, like, I get stressed out and I have made myself too available. But, I mean, there's two ways to look at that, right? Like, it also has kept a lot of customers around where early days when we didn't have the most robust feature set, and people are like, hey, I'm getting a little impatient with this not being super great. The fact that I can DM them directly and be like, hey, I hear you. We're working on it. We have two engineers on it now. It'll be live in three weeks and they have a relationship directly with the CEO. It has bought a lot of our users a Little bit more time and patience to work with us.

Us. Are you ever saying that in your emails, like, hey, if you guys have any suggestions or problems, like, email us or message us here? And those emails, when people sign up, like, is that like, yeah.

We used to ask for feedback pretty frequently. It's like a balance because, like, feedback's great. We also are like pretty strapped on band.

It'll distract.

We have like, we have eight engineers. They're hustling. Our road map is very, very built out. We keep like 10 to 20% room for like, the feedback that we weren't anticipating that we think is actually a great idea and should prioritize. I think that's a mistake a lot of companies make of, like, here's like the 10 things we're building in Q3, and we are not building anything else but these 10 things, like, focus is great, but what if, like, something comes up that's actually a complete difference maker or a competitor launches something that's stealing a lot of your market share, getting a lot more traction than you expected? Or a user just has an incredible idea that you're like, actually, when I look at my 10 things that I felt we were going to build, this is actually more important and more valuable than four of them. So why don't we bump that up? So I think you have to strike a very delicate balance of hyper focus. Like, this is what we're trying to build. We can't just take every point of feedback and iterate and change the roadmap based on whatever someone DMs us. But you need to have some level of being receptive to feedback and willing to shift things around to accommodate users as the landscape changes.

Okay, really good advice. Any other tools?

Kind of the main ones.

A little random one. You guys are pretty much. You guys built what a lot of tools. A lot of people would use tools. You guys built stuff that people would use tools for?

Yeah, I'm sure we use something. I don't know what the platform is for social media to get all the posts out.

I know what you're talking about. I always forget that one.

I know what you're talking about. They're dime a dozen. They stop working and then we use another one and then. No, I'm sure I'm forgetting some tool that's like super valuable to us, but, like, clearly not valuable enough for me to remember right now. So. Okay, we got the main ones.

All right. Well, we're. I think we're probably past two hours and we could talk all day. But last question I'll probably ask you or leave you with is what, what problem? Or what idea that you didn't think. No, what idea that you didn't think would be that impactful or that good of a feature for your tool that you implemented was actually way more successful than you thought it would be?

I'd say it's something we're investing where, I mean, I don't know when this launches, so this will be live by the time that this launches. But tomorrow we're launching the ability to customize your homepage page. And we play like a very weird space. And we're primarily a newsletter platform, but we provide a website for you out of the box. If you want to host your own fully custom website on WordPress or Webflow, like you can integrate with our tech, use us for email newsletters, use your own website, but out of the box we do have website features. And so there's always a delicate balance of like, we'll never be as ExpanSive as a WordPress who's been doing it for like 15, 20 years, or like a Webflow which is a multi billion dollar company solely on building websites. But can we get closer where we can solve most of your use cases? So we're kind of balancing that.

How far do you want to take that?

Yeah, so how far do we go? Like this is the end of the line and anything beyond this, like, here's our APIs, here's how you'd integrate. You go use one of those platforms versus like the endless, like, oh, you could customize this or here's like five new layouts that you can use. But the website is actually like the, it's the homepage and like the first touch point of, of people's online presence and their content. And so people are very opinionated on how their website looks, how it converts, what custom, what customizations you can have around the website. And so it's always kind of been like, it's cool that we offer a website, but like, you know, the newsletter, the growth, the monetization is like where I'd say like 80% of our focus is. A month and a half ago we launched customizing your landing page so you can have background images, you can add testimonials, you can add different layouts, you can add different styles and images, the little details. It was the number one feature we've ever launched in terms of like how many people used it and in terms of people upgrading. So we put it on like a paid plan. And so we had so many people that were hanging out on the free plan. But the fact that you could customize your landing page to have an awesome background color and image and testimonials makes sense move the needle more than any of our other features and it caused the most upgrades that we've ever had in a really weird week. And so tomorrow we're doing an extension of that where you can now. So there's like the landing page where you collect emails, but then there's like the homepage which is like newyorktimes.com essentially where like the, the premium stories are all the most recent posts, the authors other widgets and tomorrow we're launching the ability to customize the hell out of that page.

Cool.

More layouts, more themes, more widgets, more features and customization options. My guess is it's going to do really well. But that's like an insight that I knew that people cared about their website, but I didn't know that it would get people who have been very stubbornly on the free plan forever to be like, that's what's going to get me to upgrade is I want people custom design to land on my website and be like, wow, that looks amazing. Maybe I only have 500 subscribers. Like it's a small operation but I at least want those 500 subscribers to feel something special when they land on my website. So that's like an insight that, that, I mean it makes perfect sense but I just don't think we ever over index.

I wouldn't think that that's the moves.

The needle and it, I, I mean I don't know how much it like moves the needle but as far as like getting people to upgrade, it did more than most other feature launches that we have.

That's real. A great answer. That's really insightful for me, Top of.

Mind for me because we're launching but after this I have to write up the whole email about it.

So have fun. You're good at those. I love your emails. Okay. Okay, I guess one last, last thing. Why should someone start a newsletter? Why should they use Beehive to do it?

So if you've been listening up until this point, the why you should start a newsletter. I think you may like the strongest bull case but you can get started. It's free to get started unless you want to use our premium newsletter, our website builder and you can pay, but it's very cost effective. You own your audience, you have a direct line to your most loyal fans. It can be top of funnel for premium content communities, affiliates, advertisements, There's a lot of monetization opportunities, and it's portable, so you can take it to whatever platform you want, whenever you want to, unlike the other big social platforms. So as far as expanding influence and making money, I think newsletters are an incredible channel. So that's the answer to why newsletters? And then why Beehive? If you've made it through two and a half hours of me talking to this point, I would hope what you would take from that is, we know what we're doing. We are obsessed with our customers. We know what it takes to make a very successful newsletter, and we're also aware and we know what we don't know in terms of, like, we're willing to listen to other people who are having success or have a hunch of what would make their newsletter more successful, and we're willing to build the tools. And I think some of our other competitors have taken philosophy over being pragmatic, and they have a very hard stance on what they think is the right way to do things. And like I said to you earlier, I don't give a shit if you use our ad network or use your own ad network. If you are making money and having success, I'm happy that you're using us and having success. And if having your own ad opportunities is better for you, we will build tools for you to facilitate managing your ad inventory better, even if it's not our ads, because your success is our success. And I think if we really nail that and continue to lean into what users want, like, that is the recipe to win in business in general. And that's like, our philosophy of Fee.

Tyler Dank. Appreciate you, brother.

Appreciate it, man.

Guys, check out Beehive.

B E B E E H I I V Com. Not good at spelling, but we're good at sending emails.

That's Tyler Dank on Twitter. Dnk. Awesome. Have a wonderful day, guys. Watch this one over. You'll learn a lot.