How to GROW Your Crypto and Web3 Newsletter | An Interview with Beehiiv Founder - Tyler Denk 🐝

All right, looks like we're working and all live. So today we're joined by Tyler from Beehive, the fastest growing newsletter platform in the space.

And if you don't know who these guys are and you call yourself a content creator, then you might need to find a new job. So, Tyler, thanks for joining us. I know I've been pestering you and the first question is, how was the salad dressing?

The salad dressing? Yeah, this is take two of the podcast episode. We tried to go last week, ordered Sweet green, didn't have any salad dressing, so we had to cancel because I had to get a second dinner and it just threw off my night. So we are back, take two, and I have a credit to Sweet Green, so we're good to go.

And also, people won't. People won't know this, but the last.

Message I received from you was, I'll be two, two, three minutes late. I'm just answering some support tickets.

So you guys, you still. You still manning the support ticket side for the. The project?

No. So not personally manning it.

We.

We have Darwin, one of our support and account managers, running it, but I like to, like, dive in every now and then, help them out with the volume of tickets. We've been growing very quickly and so tickets have skyrocketed. And I also think it's like, very humbling to see what users are complaining about and, like, where we can improve the product. So one of those, like, cliche things that I tweeted a few months ago was like, how great of a practice it is to have founders spend like five to 10 hours a week in the support channel. But it definitely keeps you humble and aware of everything going on in the platform.

Yeah, agree.

I've heard. I've heard a couple of kind of. I think there was some guys on Lenny's podcast and things saying stuff. Some. Exactly what you were just saying there. The only. It's quite hilarious, really. Complete opposite ends of the spectrum. But the last person I heard in the whole crypto and web3 space that was doing that was SPF.

And we all know how that turned.

Out, but, yeah, hopefully.

I can't imagine that's going to be the same. The same.

Yeah, I hope not.

Yeah. So we like to kind of get into a bit of an origin story on yourself and how you've kind of came to where we are now with the product and things. So I was just trying to throw across to you is what was.

What was.

What's the background on yourself? As we were entrepreneurial as a kid, what was the kind of clear or.

Muddy road path to kind of where we are now?

Yeah, I definitely say more muddy if anything. But going back to college, me and a few buddies started a company that connected entrepreneurs and startups to software developers. The thought was on college campuses like amazing computer science programs, amazing entrepreneurship in business schools, very little collaboration between the two. So we tried to bridge that gap. Students are like a pretty tough market because they don't have any money and they're very fickle. And so that was not like a billion dollar success story, but it got me and my two co founders the ability to teach ourselves how to code. We built a platform from scratch, came self taught developers, we got users, we growth marketed, we did content, anything to really grow the user base on like a student budget AKA like for free. And also just built the work ethic of when a lot of our friends were tailgating on the weekends, we would sponsor different university events at like Harvard, Toronto, Northeastern and like basically sleep in a college like dorm or whatever to like sponsor these events and just try to get users and so work ethics, startup experience, whatever. We ended up shutting that down. And I was living at home classic in my parents basement just trying to figure out what was next. And one of the co founders of Morning Brew, Austin Reif, is from Baltimore and he reached out to me asking if I had any interest in building like a social share feature in the Bottom of the Stories in the newsletter. And he's like, do you know how to do this? I'll pay you like $3,000. And I had like $4 in my bank account at the time. And so I kind of lied and was like yeah, I can figure this out, no problem. And almost quit probably five or six times during that like three week period of trying to figure that out. Eventually figured it out and and he goes, we have so much more work for you. Like we don't have an engineer on our team. And so while you're finding a job, if you just want to work remote on contract, we can toss you different initiatives. And so my goal was never to join Morning Brew. I was just kind of doing it while job searching. And towards the end of summer he reached out and was like, we actually like we've made a ton of progress. You've been crushing it. Do you want to join full time in New York? And so I had a girlfriend, an apartment, everything in Washington D.C. and kind of dropped all of that to move to New York. Joined Morning brew as the second employee back in 2017 and basically ran everything from product engineering and growth for the first 18, 20 months before we hired another growth person and a few more engineers did the referral program, the email templates, the website. We built a content management system from scratch, we built an ad management platform. And then obviously the story of Morning Group is pretty well told now, but from when I joined around 100,000 subscribers, scaling to three and a half million when I left and then acquired by Business Insider. And so that was kind of my. As a 22, 23 year old, managing $500,000 a month in acquisition, building tools with like Austin and Alex, having the confidence to let me test different things and build things on my own as like a 23 year old was like an unreal experience and I'm forever grateful for that. And the learnings that we took from that Morning Brew success story really applied that into building a platform that is now Beehive. And that's kind of like the impetus for everything we're building today.

Wow.

Yeah. 23, 22, 23 year old. Jesus. I'm only, I'm 29 and that seems like young to me. Were you kind of just given an open, open book on that? They must have obviously seen something that you seen some kind of light in you being able to just kind of be put set to your own devices and just go off and build. Was there any like the products that you were building for growth and social. What Was there any kind of reference point at that point? Because now with you guys, you've particularly now with Beehive users, set the standard of what that them kind of products look like. But I suppose back in the early days, yeah, kind of been much, much to go off there.

There was definitely predecessors to us so we always looked up to the skim. They started I think three or four years before Morning Brew and had a referral program before us. They had like the Skimbassador program. They had a great newsletter that had like the social share and like other kind of gimmicky things to help stimulate growth. And so we looked at them a lot. We were also in New York and just had different connections. I think Alex and Austin were pretty plugged in with like the Michigan and like Media Network of New York to understand like best practices, different newsletters, different media operators. And so we were a bunch of like 23 to 25 year olds just taking meetings, grabbing coffee with people who had built newsletters or media businesses before and just trying anything. I think where we did a really great job at Morning Brew was have an open minded mentality to try anything. And so we were just very scrappy. We built the different tools and data mechanisms to understand what channels worked well, what wasn't going to work well. But we had an open mind to try anything. And so that experimentation worked really well for us. Where I feel like most established larger companies, very bureaucratic, you have to run it up the ladder to see if you can get approval to and X dollars. And we were like the wild west of trying anything. And so that gave us a lot of like really interesting key learning.

Yeah. What's interesting, I was listening to completely different, not exactly too far off topic, but I was listening to a Rick, Rick Rubin interview the other day and he says whilst he's producing any suggestion that gets put forward until you test it, you read a read, don't know the outcome. So someone's kind of all high and mighty and thinks, oh that'll never work. You don't know what works until what works. And I think hearing that from him and then hearing that from you guys, it's just something that we're going to try and lean in heavily to because sometimes we can get kind of tunnel vision on how we perceive to actually grow. But yeah, I think that's really good and I exactly agree with what you're saying. If it was kind of a big bureaucratic machine from like old media, there's no way that about the flexibility to try some of the stuff that you guys did. Was there any kind of stuff that you thought was gonna really work that didn't or and I suppose the flip side of that, any stuff that you threw out there that was like this will never work, let's try it. And then really, really stuck. Was there any kind of anything she kind of remember from that?

I think like big picture. One thing that scared the shit out of me was saying like I like the, not on the growth side but on the content management system like the CMS that we built. Like we had looked at a bunch of other CMS tools to create the newsletter and a lot of them were web based. And so for a WordPress or for some sort of like webflow plugin and we were just very different as like an email first entity where we needed the output of the template and the new and like the CMS to be a perfectly crafted like HTML email that looked good in all these different mail clients which is very different than a blog CMS for WordPress. And so as like a 23 year old I was like what if I just built this from scratch, like literally from Like a empty code base. And like I'm, I have my insecurities as like a self taught developer. Like didn't do computer science. Like everything is like very scrappy, taped together works but like not perfect. And even if it was closer to perfect, I would never think so because I just don't know any better. I'm like the scrappiest engineer of all time, I'd say. And so I was like always very insecure about that and like just being hired by a company and being 23 and like kind of like out of our league being like I think I'm just going to build our own CMS from scratch and I think it'll be able to do better than all of these other content management systems that exist on the market. And so that was like a pretty big risk where I convinced them. I was like, I think it'll take three, four months and then our writers will have a tool to actually type in and write their stories every single day. And and if it goes well it will streamline everything we do. Before that we were copy and pasting into like a code file and like sending it on like mailchimp at the time. And so that was like something I was hopeful would work. But like big picture had so many insecurities and worries that like that was gonna, I was gonna be three months in and hit a roadblock that I hadn't thought of. And then it was just three months completely wasted and just like the guilt of like a small six person team spending three months of my time to realize that it was actually a terrible idea would have been pretty tough. So that's something I kind of didn't think was going to work. And it ended up working. And I think they've since moved off that cms but it lasted from my first year until acquisition. So like it got them acquired and then they eventually hired more experienced engineers than myself and rebuilt it or built like a new tech or using some other tool. So that is an example of something that did work. Fortunately stuff that didn't work, I mean we just tried every for on the acquisition side like again like the wild west of like any channel that we thought was under invested in or we could get an like an edge by being early. We would try everything. So Facebook stories, when that launched like everyone, rightfully so was like that's such a dumb idea. No one's going to use Facebook stories or because the ad format is so much different than Instagram stories or Facebook feedback like for larger bureaucratic organizations they have to get their designers like map out new assets and try it. And we were like, let's just spend three hours in Photoshop, create a bunch of assets and be like the first ones on this platform. And so we would try. We did that for Snapchat, we did it for Reddit, we did it for Quora, any sort of like ad manage ad platform. And they rolled out a new medium. We would be as quick as possible to test it. And then as you would expect, like Facebook stories didn't work super well because no one used that feature. But we were like very quick to jump on any ad platform. So that was kind of a learning where I think some you'd be able to find a little bit of arbitrage and make out like a pretty good ROI on your investment. But plenty of other times we just fell flat on your face. But we had the open mentality of being okay with trying and failing as long as we failed pretty quickly.

Yeah, yeah. I think we're trying to focus kind of chopping these kind of long form videos up into short form now because we know the kind of short form battles happening across YouTube shorts, tick tock.

Reels and Elon Musk's even hinting at bringing back vine on Twitter. So again, you completely agree with what you're saying there just trying to be first. If it works, it works. It doesn't, it doesn't just try and stuff out. Do you think like being so kind of full of youth and optimism and maybe like some positive naive at the time was allowing you to just say fuck it, let's, let's just go and try it. Do you think you did the same kind of scrappiness now or do you think those ideas wouldn't have kind of washed if you had a bit more experience on your shoulders?

I mean, I think Beehive's like fairly close. Like we've adopted a lot of that where we are 14 people that are just like anything to optimize and test different ways to either grow, make the tool work better, make the platform run better. Like we are a very fast moving organization. I think almost like sometimes a little bit too fast where we will fire from the hip launch features, not think things through entirely, but we'll solve one problem and maybe create another problem because of that problem we solved. But we move very quick and I think more often than not it's a huge advantage for us. We're also so plugged in, not just me, but I'd say more than half the team, very active, both like on Twitter and all of these other message boards, anytime that we're mentioned anywhere, we're getting like real time alpha. Like we launch something, 45 users love it, 15 users hate this about it. We can like DM those 15 users. Like we're, we're not too large to be able to do those like small things that don't scale. And so getting like one, building the relationships with those users and then also being able to collect those data points and iterate quickly. I think it's very different than how most organizations would run. I mean I was at Google for a bit before, for like 10 months before starting Beehive and from my 10 month sample size of working at Google, very, very different pace than how we are operating.

I can't imagine you working at a big cruise liner trying to either.

I thought that I did the morning brew experience when we were three people and then we scaled it to 35 and it was a success. And I was like, that's a really cool experience. And I knew that I was always a small company startup guy.

Yeah.

But I had an opportunity to join YouTube Music and Google and I was like, I've seen it small time. It'd be really cool to plug into like one of the tech behemoths and just see what that organization looks like at scale. But it was also during COVID so I was basically in my room in Brooklyn by myself working on a laptop and like an organization. I was just getting used to work from home and so I couldn't have stuck out more as someone who just didn't belong at all or never really get it. Met cool people, had a great time there, but I didn't feel super productive and definitely a different pace of work than I'm used to.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense.

So there's a lot of creators in the whole crypto web 3 NFT DeFi.

Space, particularly the area that we tend to operate in. And we've just made the shift over. We originally went to mailchimp being idiots and realized that they have the four police operating over there and you can't really talk about crypto.

And we moved over to Substack.

Like nothing against substack. We enjoyed the platform but we think that the content's at a level now of consistency and quality that we really needed to plug into something that was going to really help amplify the growth. And obviously you guys just seen the natural fit. Hence why we wanted to kind of chat and see if there's anything we can kind of take from the conversation to apply to the newsletter and also kind of push some of the creators that are in this space that I know are using other kind of newsletter platforms to kind of take a look, hopefully shift them over.

But so can we kind of just get into the product?

So basically just like a high level of what Beehive is and then I've got some kind of features and other kind of questions around the product.

Yeah, for sure. And we're getting to the point now where we're launching so many features, where it's kind of. I always forget a few different things that we have. And all at its core we are a newsletter platform that doubles as like a website and blog. So you can set up your own custom website. You can sync to WordPress or Webflow or a custom built site. But by default you can plug into our web infrastructure. It's very performant, it's quick. It has a lot of features like search, content, tagging, we're launching custom pages, custom navigation, a bunch more site builder features in the next few weeks. Then the whole site is optimized for newsletters in the sense of collecting emails and SEO optimized for content and indexing. On Google we have the web infrastructure, we have the email ecosystem where you can customize. Yes, that's the website right there. We have a few different layouts and you can search. You're using like the featured post at the top and then there's search over there. There's different like email acquisition tactics. So obviously there's subscribe forms everywhere. You can do pop up forms on individual stories. You can email gate your content as well as like a little bit more aggressive on the email side of things. Custom suite of being able to without needing coding or anything. You can change the layout and background, the fonts, the colors, the style, the buttons, how quotes look. Anything that you want to edit in your newsletter you can do with a no code editor and you set it. And we actually have a new editor launching tomorrow. I don't know when you're going to release this episode, so hopefully it's definitely out in public.

Yeah, it should be.

That's a whole other story too. Like this editor that you're showing now. When we built this way back when as a side project we had like there's like 10 or 15 popular editors to choose from and we had like here's the ideal editor but it would take six months to build and you know, before you have a single user you don't like whatever the saying is, like if it's perfect. It's probably late and so we didn't want to build the perfect. So the editor we went with I'd say is like a 5 out of 10 and it got us from 0 to 100k mrr with like a mediocre editor, which is crazy because like we are a writing platform. And so I think that is a pretty interesting insight. But we have a brand new editor that I think is like top of the line launching this week. So if you're listening to this episode, it should be out. But yeah, then we have a bunch of growth tools built into the platform. The referral program that I mentioned building at Morning Brew was the inspiration behind the referral program that we use in platforms. So you can spin that up and basically have more or less the same infrastructure of Morning Brew's referral program. In your newsletter we have a recommendation feature where you can recommend other newsletters, they can recommend you. We have a lot more in this area coming soon. But Recommendations is just like a pure network effect play of. You can find other newsletters in the crypto space or defi or wherever if it's not competing or even if it is competing, it's just a great way where you can leverage the growth of other newsletters. And we see newsletters growing by 1,000, 2,000 subscribers a week of very high quality subscribers through Recommendations. So that works really well. And then just like a bunch of email stuff. So we have email automations. You can do drip campaigns, you can do when someone upgrades to premium, you can send like a bunch of automated emails there. We have ab testing subject lines to optimize the open rate. Yeah, those are a few of the top things under the analyze tab we have. Yeah, I'm just now, now that you have this up in front of me, I can just use that. But like we have different deep dive reports of like at Morning Brew and I think I announced this like when we, when we launch the feature. But at Morning Brew we had all of our email data in one platform, our website data in a different platform, and all of this other types of data and different silos. And we paid three or four different firms a ton of money to extract all that data out, put into a data warehouse and then create dashboards that were useful for us. So we've structured our data from day one with that in mind. And so you get all these subscriber reports and post reports and analysis and out of the box. And so like it really is like looking at what we had built over three and A half, four years at Morning Brew and then working backwards and like, how would we build that into a platform from day one? And that is kind of like what Beehive has become. And there's a lot more coming.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I mean we're two posts in from migrating over, so we're really diving.

Deep into what we can actually use on the platform. Dan Noah, newsletter writers. Absolutely loving it. The format as well.

When you publish, obviously you guys have concentrated on this a lot because it just looks so much better than everything else on the market from our opinion. Don't like, trust me, we've looked everywhere. We've looked at absolutely every single one. The formatting, the writing it up, the drafting. Absolutely everything's just great for it. But yeah, we're super, super happy. Even though we've only published two for you guys up to now. The migration was, it was idiot proof to put it.

We built pools. So like again, like entering the market and just thinking how we're prioritizing, building the product, just knowing where we are. Like we like Substack has a six year head start on us and as do these other platforms. Like Maelstrom's been around for like 20 years or so. And so one of the top things we prioritize is knowing that most newsletters are already sending on another platform. One of the top things we need to build is a tool to import your content and your subscribers. So one click, here's my Substack URL. We pull in all the content. You can upload your CSV of emails. Takes 5 minutes even if you have. And I didn't hit on this in going over the features, but you can also launch a premium paid newsletter as well. On Beehive, we don't take a cut of subscription revenue. So you charge $10 a month, you get just about $10. It's minus the stripe fees. We handle all of the user authentication, the stripe, the payments, the payouts, the paywalling that, the upselling, everything you can offer, like promo codes and free trials. And so we can also migrate premium subscriptions from Substack or Convertkit or any other platform with zero disruption to your readers, so they don't know that you're switching platform. So we've thought through all of that in terms of like, growth and making it as frictionless as possible to get new users on the platform.

Yeah, Daniel took us through the tutorial when me and Dan jumped on. But even down to this calendar, if you go down to the newsletter solutions, monetize and subscriptions and you can kind of have a play around with this, with this slider. If you were to, if you wanted to go down the monetization route for paid subscribers, maybe you're going to get some power users or a lot of people have some quite strong communities in.

The whole crypto and web3space.

And definitely, I know for a fine fact there's some relatively big newsletters like eighty hundred thousand that do have a paid newsletter with a small portion. So if you listen in, I'm going to send it over. I know exactly who I'm thinking of here. But maybe they should be looking at this as well. As you say, don't take any fees, just describe transaction things like that. So that's really interesting.

And I also didn't hit on outside of just the subscriptions. We also launched an ad network as well. And so we have dozens of pretty well known advertisers launching or have already launched campaigns on our platform. They give us the target demographic that they're looking to target and we find the newsletters that have a high engagement and can optimize for basically just distributing ads, high quality ads to these different newsletters where they don't have to do the selling, they don't have to do the copywriting, they don't have to do the tests and the reporting and the invoicing. We basically automate that entire process. So whether you're looking for subscription revenue and go paid or you want to be free and monetized via ads, or both, you can do either or both. And so we have all that built out as well.

Awesome.

Yeah. So I've just got a couple of features and from a selfish perspective, I want your opinion and advice.

And then we can also highlight the features of it. So the referral system, we absolutely love it. What we wanted to do initially is just try and test it with some basic stuff like we have maybe like a quarterly report and only allow people who've referred one subscriber to gain access to that. Then further afield, as we get a bit more exotic, kind of staggering it. So if people refer 1 or if they refer 5, then the kind of incentive increases. Maybe we open up a private channel for people who've got people, five people to refer in our discord. Or even further afields, we will have paid content wall on the new channel.

Maybe like 10% of all content that we're going to be drafting up will be behind this kind of pair content wall. So if people get 10 referrals or 15 referrals maybe we can do it quarterly or annually, free subscription through there. So is there any kind of inventive ways and is it easier to go with more digitized products or kind of.

Physical products for these kind of incentives?

Yeah, for sure. So I've given a few different case studies on this and like walked through the strategy a bunch. I'd say one way to think about the incentives and rewards is understand why your audience signed up to your newsletter in the first place. And so at Morning Brew we would always do different surveys of like, here's like 15 rewards. Some are real rewards that we already had. Others were like ones that we were considering. And we'd have our readers like stack rank them. And the one that always came out on top was they've retired it, but Light Roast, which was a premium Sunday newsletter. And so Morning Brew way back when sent Monday through Friday. And then we had a Sunday newsletter that we branded as like an exclusive only for people that have three referrals. Like power, Morning Brew readers would receive the Sunday newsletter. And so it made perfect sense from the alignment of incentives of they signed up to Morning Brew because they want to be in the know, say on top of the news and like, understand what's going on in the business world. And so by packaging this like Sunday exclusive newsletter, it was more of what you've already kind of incentivized, like why you signed up in the first place. And you brand it as like an exclusive ordeal. And so we end up having, I think when I left, about 120,000 people on that email list and you needed three referrals to gain access. So we had like a top, I don't know, 5% in the world size newsletter. And it was all just consisting of people that had three plus subscriber referrals. So 360,000 signups from those readers alone at least. So that was a great case study in terms of just aligning incentives. If you have the brand recognition to do merch and whatever other physical goods, I think it can work. There's obviously a cost associated with physical goods. There's like actually creating the goods, there's the shipping, and then there's also just like the things that people don't think about, which is like the operational aspect and customer support of people saying, hey, I haven't received that in the mail yet. And then your writers or growth team, instead of focusing on growing the newsletter or writing, is like one UPS website trying to figure out and track down this package of why it didn't get delivered to your readers and then they get all pissed off. So to answer your question, a little bit more straightforward. Like, digital goods are amazing because you don't have to deal with shipping. They're typically cheaper. And like, there's typically a sunk cost initially and then it's fixed and it's all upside. So if you create a PDF of what's going on in the crypto industry or some other sort of digital asset, you create it once and you distribute it to everyone who hits it threshold. And like, that referral milestone, like, it's all, you know, free on top of that outside of distributing it. So I, I'm a huge fan of, like, the digital goods. You just kind of have to really align. Like, what would subscribers want? The community aspects great too. And like, you can set up with like, webhooks and API, like five referrals, send them an invite to Discord or whatever else you want to do. So, yeah, I think that that's like the top takeaways I got from Morning Brew. And then we also did a case study on Milk Road, and they just did one referral, got you a PDF. So they had one reward at one referral. So as low of a bar as possible, as frictionless as possible, and like an immediate source of, like, gratification once you hit that referral. And they spent, I think, eight hours writing a PDF and then that's all they've ever done. And it brewed over 20,000 referrals from that one PDF. So I think simple is usually better.

Yeah, I was just thinking as you were saying that I wonder where the kind of, where that barrier to entry hits and where the incentivization kind of.

Drops depending on how many. Because surely someone's not going to go out and get you 10 referrals.

Yeah, I would also say so the biggest thing that our biggest takeaway from Morning Brew was the fact that the most difficult transition was from 0 to 1. Once they had one referral, it showed that they knew that the referral program existed. It shows that they know how it works because they were able to get a referral and they got some sort of gratification of like, an email or acknowledgement that they did refer someone successfully. And so once they understand that learned behavior, like, oh, actually that was really easy to get a referral, then you can treat them entirely different because they're aware of it and they know how to do it. And so what Morning Brew did, almost comically, was we'd run giveaways for like a MacBook Pro or some other like big high ticket event or event or ticket or whatever. And so with the MacBook Pro, who wouldn't want a MacBook Pro? We only bought one to give away. But what it did was maybe people who weren't incentivized by the exclusive newsletter or the T shirt or the mug, they were incentivized by a free new computer. And so that would force a lot of people who are otherwise ignoring the referral program to at least get in the behavior of trying it out with the hopes and like the 1 in 10,000 chance that they did win a MacBook Pro. And so that was like a really interesting lever to help get more people involved into the ecosystem.

Nice, nice, Love that.

So how do you think about feedback systems? We've got a small kind of survey. I'll show you what we've kind of got going on now. The bottom of newsletter. But this always stood out to me on the, on the milk. On the Milk roads newsletter that how.

There was nothing, nothing over the top.

How was your rate today's edition? Totally awesome. Nothing, nothing special. You wrote me. So how does from, from your perspectives, how does that feed in? Is it to be able to tailor content to how people are receiving it.

And their feedback from there or just general kind of feedback mechanisms?

Yeah, I think that is like a great baseline. I think IT Pro like where I think Milk Road did an incredible job and I don't know if they started this or they got it from someone else, but by featuring a few pieces of a feedback from the day prior's feedback. So they would always, they get like very funny submissions. And like part of this polling feature is like yes, it's one click. You can click like totally awesome. But then it also redirects to a page that allows you to type in like a qualitative response. And so you could be like, I absolutely like love that first story. And so you can add additional feedback and then grant as like the user for Blockmates can see what everyone wrote in like the qualitative responses and filter based on that. And so what Milk Road did very smartly is feature like four or five pretty funny responses from the day before, which then encourages people to want to be, to want to respond something kind of funny in hopes that they are featured in the next day. So it has like this virtuous cycle of both encouraging more people to respond and probably more people to open the following day because they're curious whether or not they're going to be featured. And so there's like a Lot of like feedback loops there, which I don't know how helpful that becomes then for actually getting useful data out of the poll, but it definitely boosts engagement. Another thing that works really well. Like I've seen a lot of people use polls for specific stories, so they test different types of content, being like, hey, this was like a new type of story. Did you like this? Yes. No. So it's a little bit more specific towards a particular section in the newsletter or like different themes or topics or stories that you're covering. I do think like just having a very basic poll at the bottom of every newsletter can get a little bit repetitive and people probably start to mute it out unless you do something creative with it. Also, I was just playing around on the new editor all day and so now that I see the old editor, it looks like such a piece of. So I'm so excited. So hopefully everyone watches this. It's like this is like the retro old beehive before 100 KMR and post 100 is like a whole new world. So I'm pretty excited about that. But yeah, so I mean, yeah, the poll feature is awesome. Like people use it in a lot of different clever and creative ways. Another thing that's a little bit less systematic but for like email deliverability purposes we would always do it at Morning Brew. We'd like ask like different questions or prompts at the top of the newsletter like maybe once a week to encourage replies. And so from without needing to nerd out on email deliverability, replies are like a very strong signal to like Gmail and all of the inbox providers that people want your mail so. Cause not only are they opening it, but they're replying to it. And so it's a very, very strong signal. So it's good for deliverability purposes to get your email in the primary inbox more. And then it also builds like a more tangible relationship with the readers if you do have, whether the writers or interns or whoever respond back to the replies. One, it's just great for like user engagement and retention and building that relationship. But it's also great for email deliverability. So I think the combination of the polls and prompting for replies is like a great one, two punch to get feedback and see what's working. Awesome.

Awesome. Do you have any. You might be slightly biased on this, but do you have any preference on having the newsletter on a. On its own beehive allocated landing page or through its own website? We're currently going through a big website build and it's part of the reason.

We have to jump to you guys is because we want to integrate it directly into the website and have like a nice flashy landing page on the newsletter section. Do you think there's any conversion benefits or reasons to have on host through you guys for a website or just host directly through whatever website provider you're using?

Yeah, I mean I'd say like obviously. Well one the first eight to ten months of Beehive was primarily focused on newsletter. I like as even our largest most established media brands and newsletters like 90% plus of their impressions come from newsletters for the purpose that they're using us. And so while it's nice and flashy to have a great website, we just prioritized due to bandwidth, email focus and growth tactics and data over the website. That's starting to change. Like we're investing a lot of time and we have a lot of really cool initiatives for the website. That being said like we will never, I won't say never, but anytime in the next year plus have the same flexibility and openness of like a WordPress or webflow where they're multi billion dollar companies or organizations focused on just like web experiences and plugins and everything there. So like if you want a custom, a full custom website experience with like video and like different like animations and everything else, like I don't think Beehive, at least in its current form is best for that. We are great for depending on the strengths and weaknesses of your team is what I always say is considering if you have a two person team that's writing content, do you really want to outsource or hire a developer to build an SEO optimized website that's optimized for conversion, that can track where subscribers are coming from, what the conversion rates are, where subscribers are more likely to engage and have the images and videos and assets all render properly. And if that's in your wheelhouse and you have the bandwidth and skills or money to hire someone to do that, and you do have the aspirations of a full web ecosystem, then for sure go for that. We won't be able to match that functionality. But if you just want to focus on creating a incredible newsletter, writing content and allowing us to do things that we know that works well, which is we know how to host a website, make it very performant, have it optimized for email conversion, make sure that the images are resized and that they're in the right format and that the content's going to load and you can do the pop up forms and email collection and everything else like that is kind of like our sweet spot of, you know, something that you don't need to focus on, I'd say. And so there's kind of like a trade off there. And there's also, it's also like a function of time, like the longer that we are a company and we get more and more feedback of hey, can you add custom navigation? Can I add an author page? Can I add an about page? Can I have search functionality that does xyz? Can I try these different layouts? We are always taking input from user feedback and building additional features based on that feedback. It is a matter of time until our web experience becomes very advanced and customizable. But probably nowhere in the next three to four months and definitely in the the next year will we compete with a WordPress. But that's also why we're investing in RSS, APIs and everything else where you could have your own web ecosystem on a WordPress site or a custom built website and pull in content, send subscribers to us, use web hooks and API to be able to do what you need to do. And that is different from a lot of the other email players that are kind of like a closed ecosystem. And so we're trying to do the best of both worlds, have a really advanced web offering. But if you choose not to, also play very nice with all the big web players as well.

Yeah, nice, nice.

Can we get into. We've only just tested this feature out, but the A B testing for your headlines effectively. Let me see if I can find that on here.

Yeah, might be a different post. Yeah, that's the one you just created. Can go view all or. Yeah, one of those right there. A B test.

Yeah, so we tested, tested with a small sample size, but I don't think we had.

Titles are very similar to be honest. But I don't think we had statistical significance.

But just the idea that we can.

Do this is really, really great because me and Dan are always arguing about how do we create clickable titles that aren't over the top clickbaity. But we need to get conversion and clicks at the same time as well. So I think me and Dan might have a competition going on here with the AB testing. I love this feature.

I think it's great.

We would always do stuff like that at Morning Brew too where we would always debate which subject line and like bet on which subject line we thought was going to win. And so totally different as well. Like when we were at like a million to 2 million emails we would just sample like 5% of the list. And we also did like ABCD testing, so four different subject line variants which you can also do in Beehive. And so any given day we had four different subject lines going out. And I'd say The difference between first place and fourth place can be upwards of like three and a half, four percent, which depending on morning brew size, like three and a half, four% is a lot. And especially as like an ad based model, like the difference of 40,000 additional people opening your newsletter makes a big difference in what you're charging advertisers. So it ended up being like a very meaningful, over the course of a year, like you're talking millions of additional impressions that you're making off of ads through AB testing. And so yeah, that's like a pretty big feature that we got out earlier I guess last year now.

But yeah, yeah, nice, nice.

Now we're getting close to the top of the hour. Just want to touch on one final.

Point and then we can wrap up monetization through Beehive. Third party in house ad network that you guys are building or monetization directly. Is there, is your preference on your end or is there, is there a right or wrong way? Is it. Know your audience and know what they want? How do you guys kind of look at that?

Yeah, it's probably what you. The last thing you said, know your audience and know what they want. Like for me personally, I don't give a. Like for the way that I've always thought about it is like whatever is best for our users. I don't want to, to impose our business model or what is better for us as a business, as what we're pushing on our users. And so for example, there are certain platforms where they only make money off of subscription revenue. And so it makes sense that they favor and push users who have a premium subscription because that's where they make their cut. And large free newsletters or ad based newsletters do absolutely nothing for them. And so we're actually the inverse, right? Like we don't take a cut of subscription revenue because we don't think like we charge a flat rate SaaS fee. And the service that we provide you, whether you have 10 paying subscribers or 10,000 paying subscribers, doesn't really change for us. And so we don't think we should take a cut of your subscription revenue. So we have very predictable flat rate pricing and we think that's better for the content creator where we do take a cut of ad revenue because we're Doing like the sourcing of ads and all of the logistical work in between. But that doesn't mean we're like forcing ads through like all of our newsletters. We think it's a value add where a lot of these newsletters are 1, 2, 3, 4 person teams who don't have a dedicated seller. And so that that team is focused on writing content and growing the newsletter with absolutely no work outside of saying yes, we can place high quality ads in your newsletter and as long as it aligns with your vision and brand and everything else you're now monetizing with without having a salesperson or needing to do any lift or work on your end. So I think it's like a tremendous value add where charging for subscription revenue is just syncing up stripe and being a middleman and just taking a fee for being a middleman, which I'm not a huge fan of in that model. But yeah, at the end of the day, whether you run affiliates, ads, subscriptions, tips, anything, it's really like what is best for us is the success of our content creators and newsletters. And as long as they're growing and finding ways to monetize effectively and they can pay themselves and reinvest in growth, like that's better for us to build success stories versus us trying to extract money wherever we can from our users.

Yeah, completely agree with that. I mean, my perspective on the vast majority of everything is just try and.

Give us as much away for free as possible. Because I think particularly in the space.

That we operate in, in the crypto and web3 space, there's enough stupid money sloshing around for extremely overvalued companies that we don't necessarily have to go direct to the reader to be asking them.

To kind of foot the bill to.

Keep our lights on effectively. So we always Want to work B2B, work on sponsorship, work on partnerships and go down that route. As I say on the, on the new website, we will have a more.

Kind of premium content thing. But I think that's going to be really, really low barrier to entry for cost.

But yeah, we're gonna throw the kitchen sink at this.

From paid acquisition and absolutely everything this year. We wanna, we wanna be one of your next success stories. Leading on from the milk road, how successful that was.

Love what Sean's done there.

Obviously you guys have done an incredible job as well. So hopefully 12 months down the line we have a similar sort of success story coming out the Blockmates camp. But there's one platform to do it. We took a Look around and we were all hell bent on getting over to Beehive and trying to grow alongside you guys. So wanna thank you for your time and hopefully we can have another conversation as I say, in 12 months time. All very happy with how the processes went from both sides.

Yeah, we just saw through your demo how the, how big the list is now it's do it again in 12 months and hopefully it's 10x that, 20x that at least and hopefully another huge success story. So looking forward to it.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Just, just one final thing. How did you guys just get money thrown at you in the beginning? Or was it a difficult crime to get the fundraising over the line or.

Definitely.

I can imagine, I can imagine. You guys are a future unicorn. Not just saying that because you're here. I think it's, I think it's just a natural progression. So I just wondered how that looked.

Yeah, initial fundraising I think for most first time, although like I did the failed company in college and start up with like Morning Brew, I was not a founder but very early I guess technically like this was my first startup like in the real world outside of college. And I feel like with most first time founders it's somewhat difficult to raise money. I mean we, we raised money summer of 2021 right when Facebook announced bulletin and maybe eight to 10 months after Twitter acquired Revu. And so it's also funny saying that now that Bulletin and Revu have both shut down in the past probably six months. But VCs who see two of the largest tech companies, I don't know if Twitter is one of the largest, but Facebook for sure. And then Twitter demands a lot of space and authority and so to have both of them launch a newsletter competitor and there's already Substack as the clear market leader. ConvertKit's been around for like 10 years. Mailchimp's the behemoth and a bunch of others in between. It's like a very competitive space, like very saturated. And so while most of those players are more focused on e commerce and marketing emails and we're like strictly on like content based newsletters. Not easy raising money in such a competitive space when there is a clear market leader. And then also there's always talk of like, is email dead? Is, is there like newsletter fatigue? How many newsletters actually are there? And like one of my favorite things is Ben Thompson of Sir Techery quoted that the Internet's always so much bigger than people give it credit for. And like every day when I see these signup like we're seeing over a thousand signups a day some days. And the newsletter categories and content and topics coming in are so out there that you, like, would never think that there's a community of 2,000 people who would sign up for that, but there is. And, like, we're also not just going after the Long Tail content creators. We're going after the next wave of morning brews. Whether it's like a milk road Fantasy Life, which is a huge fantasy sports newsletter, there's a bunch of, like, an up and coming wave of newsletters that are building a real business around their newsletter. And, like, that's who we're targeting. Not necessarily just the Long Tail content creator, but to answer your question directly, not super easy. Now we're at a point where we're probably two months away from profitability and there's definitely investors who reach out pretty frequently to try to get involved. And now it's really great to tell them that we're not really interested. We're just building and trying to build a property.

Yeah. Where were you at the beginning? No, I bet that's a good feeling. Yeah. Awesome. Tyler, thank you very much. As I say, I hope you can have another conversation in 12 months and we far exceed your 20x and hopefully, yeah, see what we can do together in the future. But, yeah, once again, thank you very much. I know it's getting. Getting late over your end, so might as well get back to answer some of those support tickets.

Yeah, I want it. Don't worry. Thank you, Grant. Take it easy, man.

All right. Take it easy, bud. Bye.