How Tyler Denk Took Beehiiv from 0 to $750,000/month in 2.5 Years

What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, my personal diary made public for the early stage Entrepreneur. Since bringing back Founder's Journal, I have told you that I will be testing a ton of new content to make this show as valuable as humanly possible and through testing I have arrived at a structure that I feel really good about. Three episodes per week. Three types of episodes. One episode is a diary style founder's journal from me where I reflect on my week as an entrepreneur. A another episode is a 10 to 20 minute tactics focused episode where I address a major question or challenge that many early stage entrepreneurs face by curating a best in class guest to help give you the answer. And then finally one episode is a more traditional interview where I have a conversation with a world class entrepreneur or investor all through the lens of how can this help an early stage builder? Well, I'm excited to say that today we are kicking off the interview style episode with an amazing friend and founder who also happened to be a teammate of mine at Morning Brew. Tyler Dank is the co founder and CEO of Beehive, a fast growing newsletter platform that powers some of the world's top newsletters, from Arnold Schwarzenegger's Arnold's Pump Club to Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life. The business launched in the summer of 2021 and it racked up pretty amazing accolades in just two and a half years since the business is doing around $750,000 a month in revenue with a team of 45 employees and it was recently voted number one most promising consumer startup by the Information and it has raised $16.7 million since inception. Our conversation is wide ranging but roughly split into three parts. First, we talk about Tyler's career journey, including his college startup Venturestorm, his decision to walk away from two corporate jobs, and his experience at Morning Brew and ultimately Beehive. Second, we talk about key business drivers that have enabled Beehive's growth, including early product decisions and manufacturing buzz via product drops and the keys to building a strong remote culture. And third, we talk about Tyler as a person and a founder, how he's evolved since his college startup days, the hardest conversation he's had to have since starting the business, and how the way he spends his time as a founder has evolved. I learned so much from this conversation and I think you will as well. So without further ado, my conversation with Tyler Dank Rince takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you said.

You hear about Dave.

Or even tea time. Tea time. Tea time you. Mm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry rinse. It's time to be great. Tyler, excited to. To be chatting with you.

What up? Excited to be here.

For those of you that can't see Tyler, which is all of you, since I think we're doing this audio only, he is just.

Oh, that, that makes me feel even better than I was. Like, trying to like prepare myself, make sure like my, my stomach isn't showing.

Yeah, he, he's basically, he's basically wearing no shirt in the sweltering Costa Rica weather. So I think for everyone's sake, it's good that we video at the moment. You know, as I was saying to Tyler before the episode, he's been on a lot of shows recently and they, you know, some of these interviews and interviewers have done a great job of covering Tyler's story and I want to hit on a little bit of it. So you guys have a good foundation for his story and like the origins of Beehive. But I really want to focus this on kind of what he's learned around building early stage companies that can help you build your early stage company. So let's just set the foundation for a few minutes.

Give.

Give your short story. So like, what, what is your story?

Oh, short story. I went to the University of Maryland, did technology entrepreneurship, minor study mechanical engineering, taught myself how to code while in school. While in school and teaching myself how to code. Me and two co founders built a company called venturestorm. It helped connect entrepreneurs and startups to software developers, ideally on the same campus. So the thinking was a lot of really smart business school students, very entrepreneurial, a lot of really great computer science students looking for opportunities. Let's connect them on the same campus. Campuses are known to be like a big entrepreneurial hub from everything, from like Stanford and Harvard and everything else that you hear. That was not a wildly successful startup, but got my feet wet in terms of what does it take to actually build something from 0 to 1? How do you take nothing, talk to users or potential users, understand their pain points, what would solve their problems, and then turn that into a product via code and then market with more or less no budget whatsoever. So as students, we weren't venture backed, we didn't have any money. We created content on medium on Quora, found Any way that we could basically grow our user base. And sponsored hackathons showed up to everything from University of Michigan to University of Harvard, sleeping on dorm room floors, trying to get in front of student developers to sign up. Fast forward a few years and your co founder, Austin Reif is a good friend of mine from back in Baltimore. And he reached out, we were just talking about Morning Brew and its growth and he was like, hey, there's a lot of interesting things happening in the newsletter space. We have Axios, we have the Skim. The skim's growing like crazy with this referral program. If you can help us build this referral program, we'll pay you a few thousand dollars and I think there could be more work after that if you do a great job. I had I think under $5 in my bank account. I was living at home post graduation. He said a few thousand dollars. I said, don't worry, I'll figure it out. I got this and built the referral program for Morning Brew which led to basically just building a bunch of other tech initiatives at this time. I think it was you, Austin, Neil and Mike as the writers. And so no technical competence in house on the team. It was more just like writing and using like basic tech to get the email out. I came in that summer and built a lot of the infrastructure. The growth that led to a full time job moving to New York and joining the team as the second third employee there. And then the rest is kind of history. Three and a half years at Morning Brew, left right before the acquisition by Business Insider, did everything from the product and growth side of things. So building the referral program, building a CMS for the writers to actually create the content. We built an ad management system for the sales team and the copywriting team to integrate into the workflow and report the performance of the ads back to advertisers. We built the custom website. So Morning Brew was like an incredible experience. I've said it on many podcasts, but I think it's like a huge testament to both you and Austin. And one, hiring an incredible early stage team and then also giving me the ability as a 23 year old in New York and like my first ever real job to try things fail, but continue to test different opportunities and kind of learn from what I was attempting to do. And so not many 23 year olds get to run product and engineering and growth and have an opportunity to fail so many times and learn from those experiences. And that led to what eventually became Beehive a few years later.

A Lot to uncover there. You know. One thing I just want to ask you is actually about your Venture Storm days. Two questions I have. The first is why did venturestorm fail? And like, do you, do you think it could have been a viable business? Like is there a market for what you were trying to build with venturestorm? Kind of what, what made it not work?

Yeah, so a few things. One, like we kind of didn't know what we were doing. We identified a problem which I believe exists and probably still exists today. The business model wasn't great, so we were targeting college students. College students traditionally don't have a ton of capital. And so I mean, just like a big thing for entrepreneurs in general. Targeting a core user that doesn't have money is not a great way to make money.

Yeah.

So students were a really tough market. It was also the business model was like we were kind of going up against like an upwork in a transactional type of like freelance website, but it was for co founder matchmaking in a way. And so it's hard to monetize matchmaking for co founders because if you do it well, it happens once. And so are you charging for like duration and access to the platform, which means you're doing a really bad job if you're making a lot of money from that because you're not matching them to the co founder or if you're targeting two students who need to find a technical co founder, it's just like a very hard business to monetize. So I think like fundamentally the business model was either very high volume transactional, like an upwork and freelance website, or like some sort of co founder matchmaking platform which like if you do it well, it happens once. It's hard to monetize and repeat. And we weren't venture backed. We didn't have relationships in the industry. We didn't have any confidence in terms of like this industry, what it takes to be successful. So I could probably go on and on about like just kind of choosing the wrong market and the wrong business model. But fortunately that's like the benefit of starting a company in college is you can fail. Like I didn't have any bills outside of tuition and there's no downside to failing in that business attempt.

Yeah, I mean it sounds like the problem is very real. You still think it's a problem, but just monetizing kind of a marketplace between technical and non technical co founders is kind of a weird thing to monetize. And you're trying to monetize an audience that doesn't really love to be monetized in terms of pulling out their wallet to pay for it. I want to talk about the two times that you left let's call it corporate jobs. Well, one time you didn't even go into a corporate job. The other time you actually left a corporate job. How easy or hard was the decision of not going to Deloitte and joining the Brew? Like when you were trying to go through that decision making process?

Yeah, and so I kind of skipped over that part in like my quick backstory. But basically during the summer while I was doing contract work with Morning Brew, I was applying for full time jobs, partially because there was like no guarantee that Morning Brew was going to be a full time job, partially because Austin, when I visited New York, said he was looking at X Google and Facebook engineers to hire at the Brew. And I was like, well, that's definitely not me. So I just assumed that that wasn't in the cards. So I was applying for different jobs that entire summer, got a full time offer to do technology consulting at Deloitte. Really? I mean, a lot of people from the University of Maryland, especially in engineering, just kind of filter into Washington D.C. tech consulting jobs. And so that was a good opportunity. I had a girlfriend that lived in dc, I had an apartment and a friend and like a good, well paying, secure job. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received from another friend named Austin actually was when I was weighing between the two opportunities, he was like, you could be one of 20,000 people at Deloitte in that exact same role, or you could be one of one, the only person building what you're building at Morning Brew and make a real difference. And so I think everyone has a different appetite of risk for me doing something where I wasn't complacent but could actually make a difference and be the only person doing that is what attracted me to the opportunity. And then the upside is obviously much higher if you do make a bet on yourself and can pull that off.

Totally. And now let's talk about, you know, you actually went to Google. If I remember, you're working on YouTube music. Right. And product. When you left the Brew, where how did you know it was the right time to ultimately leave Google? Like, how did you feel like you were de risked enough to go work on Beehive full time?

Yeah, there's a few things there, I guess, like leaving Morning Brew. Three and a half years of Morning Brew, as I already mentioned, like, probably the best professional experience I've had outside of Beehive small sample size but like I couldn't say enough about the experience there. And so at that point I was like I saw Morning brew go from four people to 40 people. I saw very small startup, almost like being feeling like a co founder in terms of ownership all the way up until senior leadership. We have full divisions and companies and orgs within the company and that was an incredible experience. And so for a personal level at age of like 26, what else could I learn? I looked at Google as like if I've seen the 0 to 1, what does it look? They go from like 1 to 100 in terms of like massive behemoth tech company where they. And again I fell into the product space. And so Google is known as like the gold standard of product management. I was totally self taught product management. I didn't know what product management was at Morning Brew. I just kind of put the pieces together between growth and mocking up designs and engineering. So I felt very raw in my skill set at Morning Brew like what a PM was, went to Google and with the intention of learning what does product management actually mean? How do you do it at scale and how does an organization of 150,000 people actually operate? And so that was something I just wanted to learn and like at a stepping stone in my career, take that in to become a better pm, whatever. When I decided to go all in on Beehive I was one, kind of like moonlighting nights, weekends, building the company. And so we had like an MVP under wraps where we are working on it throughout my entire time at Google. So there's like a de risk of not like quitting my job, having zero paycheck and going all in on a business that has no business model, no revenue, nothing. So that's one aspect of de risking of like there was something built. We also had an mvp. We had validation in the market. We were during the MVP stage. While we were building we were constantly talking to potential users who would use the product, understanding where we fit in the market and how we were going to actually go from pre launch to launch successfully. And so there was like a lot of validation points built into that. And then lastly probably like the most obvious is we secured a seed round right before going all full time on that. And so I was not in a place personally, financially to be able to like go with like the classic like entrepreneurial ramen diet, like don't pay yourself like you know. And neither were my two co founders. They were both married like you know, further along in their lives. And then the Other thing with, like, beehive, like, getting it off the ground from the 0 to 1 is like, there's a lot of fixed costs associated with, like, having an email vendor. Like, if you want to do it right, there's like, upfront contracts of 50, $80,000 a year, which we couldn't front. So getting a seed round secured, guarantee that we could successfully launch, guarantee that we could successfully pay ourselves and kind of de risk what it looked like to go all in on our business.

Yep. This is something that a lot of founders who raise money ask me, and I don't know that there's a right answer. I think there are some wrong answers. But when you were thinking about when you were raising your seed round, is that the one you raised from Howard Lindsay?

Yeah.

Okay. So how are you thinking about what to pay yourself? Like, how. How do you think through? Basically, you know, you have to tell an investor, use of funds. You, like, know you need to take care of your lifestyle, so you're not, like, stressed about that every day versus building your business. But also you don't want to come off as, like, greedy and living a bougie lifestyle. How do you find the balance?

Yeah, it's tough for sure, because I think a lot of people are trained to want to, like, almost show off the fact that they're not taking a huge salary because it's like, I'm investing all my time, all the money into the business. At the end of the day, it's like an opportunity cost like anything else. Like, you know, your balance sheet, you know how much you can get by to live like a normal life, and how much you need to have available in the business to invest in hiring other employees, infrastructure, whatever it is, to take your business to the next level. And so what I don't believe in at all is like, hey, pay yourself nothing and really prove like, you're some part of that can live off, like, $25,000 a month. Because at the end of the day, as an entrepreneur, you want to make sure that all of your focus and attention are focused on the business and not how are you going to pay rent? How are you, like, you don't want to do XYZ because you don't have enough capital to do so. I think there's something to be said about, like, 99% of my worries are all business focused in life, which could also be a problem, but totally different conversation. But, like, financial is not one of them, so I don't have to worry about, like, should I take. I know some Entrepreneurs that actually get into, like, kind of pivoting their business to do consulting as well. And they kind of phrase it as I'll do consulting to learn about the space a bit more. But it's really kind of to pay the bills. And I think it's just a total distraction from what it takes to scale your business successfully. I think ultimately, if you can find the right balance between you have enough capital to make the hires and invest in what you need, you're not being totally irresponsible and you can take care of yourself and live a quote unquote normal lifestyle. There's definitely some sort of balance there. I think my initial salary is like 100, 125, I think when we raised our seed round and then for transparency, we raised 2.6 million. So me and my two co founders all had the same salary of between 100 and 125.

Got it. And let's talk about just the idea for Beehive. So obviously, you know, I remember at points in the brew where you would come to Austin and I and talk through, like, hey, we should maybe think about off, basically the entire tech stack that we've built internally for our business to create newsletters, to work with advertisers, to support our content team. Like, we should do this for others. And I'm curious, do you remember when you first had that idea?

Yeah. So the beauty about emails, like, every time we sent an email to a million people, we'd get 20, 30,000 responses back, which is also very overwhelming. But it's amazing. Touch point with your target readers and audience of what's working, what's not. I'd say 80% of those emails were about the content itself. Like, hey, I didn't agree with this story. Hey, that's a really weird take. Or, hey, I love your newsletter. I read it every day. But there was always a constant influx of, I don't know, at least the ones that were forwarded along to me, 10 to 15 people in our readership per day who were like, this referral program is very interesting. What software do you use for the referral program? Or your newsletters look so much more distinct than all the other newsletters in my inbox. How are you creating these newsletters and formatting in a way that looks that good in the inbox or whatever? And so there was always these, like, interest and touch points from whether it was hobbyists and readers who wanted to create their own newsletter, whether they worked at a larger publication or business, and they had a newsletter initiative that they were in charge of and they wanted to explore. But there was a constant intake and feedback of the referral program works super well. I've referred 20 people and I'd love to implement it for my newsletter, but I can't figure out what software you're using. So that was like the main touch point that the different things that we were doing just to naturally grow our business was interesting to other people that were also our readers. There was also the fact that almost every answer or everything that they asked us of, like how were you doing? X the answer was like it was custom built. As in there wasn't a third party solution. And so what they were hoping was like, hey, this referral program, if you can just point me in the direction of whoever you're using to it, that would have solved their pain point. But when I would respond, actually we spent like four months building this custom. There is no off the shelf solution that also showed not just interest but like a lack of a competitor in the market that was solving that pain point. And so I think it was the combination of those two over the course of three years for different things. Right. The referral program was probably the biggest one that I think I pushed the most onto you. And also like maybe we should white label this totally. But also as we built out the CMS and some of the other internal tools, it ended up being like the ecosystem as a whole was a well oiled machine and for non technical journalists, writers, small publishers, they don't have like depths of engineering talent to invest in building these custom solutions.

Yeah. So it just sounds like basically having just this massive influx of emails for months straight you just kind of like if you, if you pattern match well enough, you just see what people are consistently asking about and the fact that there's no just out of the box solution you can send them to is like pretty good early signs. I want to talk in a minute about, about what you were saying about the referral program. I think you were talking to Danny Miranda and you were basically saying how like in the early days when you had the mvp you would like nervously basically look every day to see if, if basically someone else had built it because you were like worried that like this was kind of going to be the thing that created buzz in the market. And I want to talk about, and if you like if do you believe in building in public or like do you actually think there's value to stealth? But just to talk about kind of the very early days of Beehive a little bit more how did you think about what you wanted your MVP to be? Meaning, like, what product features did you think were important to provide to your early customers? Such that you can even get, like, you wouldn't get a false positive on if there was demand for your product? Like, you were actually testing what you wanted to test?

Yeah, there's a few things. The product itself now is like, pretty comprehensive. And so we do a few different things. We host a website for our users. So there's like a full web component that could mimic a WordPress or a webflow. There's the actual email sending component, which is like a mailchimp type solution where you can send emails that actually leave the platform, go to the inbox of your readers. And then there's like the growth tools in terms of like the referral program and recommendations and boosts. For us, the first proof of concept was can we build a text editor where you can actually go and create content? You can send that content to your audience and it would also live on an archive on a website where you can also collect emails. So RMVP was simply the most basic website builder you could possibly imagine. It does two things. It collects emails and it posts and it publishes all of your published posts in an archive. And then the other component is a text editor that you can send emails and it'll simultaneously look good in email and on the website site. So that is what we went to market with when we announced our public launch in November.

So the referral program wasn't even part of the initial launch.

That was a fast follow. I think you launched that in January of 2022. So it was like three months or two months after launch. But yeah, it was. That was part of the packaging of why we were unique in the market. But we actually didn't go to market with the referral program.

It's super interesting and I want to spend a bunch of time talking about it because, you know, you describe your MVP and it's like very basic sounding. It's like, in a lot of ways it's what we needed when we were starting sending out newsletters as Morning Brew in the beginning without the referral program. And you also add that to like, you look at the landscape of ESPs, email service providers and like different tools for sending email, whether it's Mailchimp, Klaviyo, SendGrid, Campaign Monitor, Substack. Like, there's so many that again, I think similar to how people looked at Morning Brew and they were like, you're trying to do business news, aren't There like eight companies that are massive that do this. I think people probably had a similar perspective for the space you are trying to enter. Yet what's been fascinating is how kind of like in the zeitgeist Beehive has become, even though it's such a crowded space. But before we get into kind of how you've done that, I want people to have a snapshot of the business today. So can you just kind of describe what does the business look like today and then take me through kind of like the core metrics that you're most focused on and your team's most focused on.

Yeah, for sure. So right now we are 45 full time employees. We're totally remote. We're across eight different countries. I believe right now we are coming up on our second year anniversary since launching. So we launched November of 2021. We have, we're doing about $750,000 a month in revenue. It's about 85% SaaS revenue to break down our business and like how we make money. We are SaaS primarily. So like any of these other newsletter providers that you're used to, we charge a flat rate monthly fee based on how many subscribers you have. We're extremely affordable. So we have a free plan, a $49 a month plan and the $99 a month plan. If you have under 100,000 subscribers, you're on the $99 plan that comes with every feature from the referral program. Growth tools, monetization tools. Above 100,000 subscribers we have enterprise. But that's like more bespoke but still like by far the most cost efficient solution in the market. The core product itself, what it does, it's a little bit of expanding on what I just kind of hit on. But you go to create content, you send the newsletter, we host a website. It's much more advanced than what we went to market with. So there's tons of different layouts and customizations both on the website side and on the email side. We have growth tools to help you scale your newsletter from the referral program. Very similar to Morning Brews, we have a recommendation network where you can recommend other newsletters in the ecosystem. We have a boost network which is basically the ability to pay to grow your newsletter. So kind of like co registration of what we did at Morning Brew and a lot of other newsletters, you could say I'm willing to pay $2 per subscriber to grow my newsletter. Every newsletter in the Beehive ecosystem sees that offer. They can apply to and boost your newsletter. And then the flip side is they are now getting paid $2 to promote and drive subscribers to your newsletter. So in an ideal world, it's very symbiotic that one side of the marketplace who has a budget to grow faster can pay to grow faster. And it's by trusted newsletters, first party data in our ecosystem. And now the other side is getting paid for their newsletter irregardless of how large they are. So I think one thing that's interesting is historically people would ask, how big does my newsletter have to be before I can start monetizing? And if you're ad based, it used to be like, I don't know, maybe 10,000 is big enough where an advertiser would at least look in your direction to see if you could sell them. Now, with boost, you could have 17 subscribers, but you could then refer, if you refer five subscribers a day for $2 per lead, that's $10 a day. You're making $300 a month. And so you're monetizing from day one. Now that you're making $300 a month, you pour that into growth. Now you're growing faster and then you can eventually grow fast enough to get ads and advertisers. So I'd say the barriers of entry to growing, to monetizing your newsletter has decreased significantly. And because monetization has decreased significantly, growing has also decreased very significantly. So that's kind of like part of the ecosystem. And then like the other thing that I mentioned, kind of touched on the ad network. But our big bet, and you know it better than anyone from building the ad process and sales team at Morning Brew is Morning Brew was primarily ad based revenue, as was the skim, as was Axios, as was Politico. All of these newsletters were able to have a great grasp on who their audience is and be able to convert their readers into good target audience for advertisers. What that requires though, is a sales team who actually has the data to understand who their audience is, who's good at getting in front of the brands, who's good at selling, why they should advertise in their specific newsletter. And then there's copywriting, reporting, invoicing, and all the other miscellaneous things that go into building an ad sales team for media. What we are looking to do is build the largest ad network for newsletters. So we're now sending about 700 million emails a month. That's a lot of impressions that brands want to get in front of. Maybe they want to target women in their 30s, they would have to search Google endlessly to find the 10, 20, 30 best newsletters that have that demographic. But because we have all this first party data, that brand could be Brooklyn. And hypothetically they could give us $100,000 a month and we could target 30, 40 of the top newsletters with that target demographic with their ads. So it's a win for the advertiser because they're getting in front of very niche audiences and that they otherwise probably wouldn't have access to to like the newsletters convert really well. And then on the flip side, these newsletters are now getting monetized by very premium advertisers without having a sales team, without doing copyw about doing reporting. And so that's kind of the ecosystem that we're trying to build. So a bit of a tangent in terms of like where we are as a business, but everything I just mentioned is fully launched and built now. So from the product side, that's where we are. I mentioned 700 million emails a month. I mentioned $750,000 in revenue.

How much have you guys raised?

So we raised 2.6 million in our seed round, which was in the summer of 2021. And then we went full time shortly after raising that round, we did an extension round of 1.6 million the following May, June. So that's May of 2022. And then we raised a formal series A in June of this year. So June 2023, which was 12 and a half million. So I think it's 16.7 million total raised.

Yep. Okay, awesome. And one last question on just kind of where you're at now. And then the reason I want to cover that is so people can kind of just see over, you know, you've been working on the business in summer of 2021, so you're two and a half years under. Two and a half years into this. Right. Like, it's been pretty remarkable, the trajectory of going from having an MVP that's basically like website that posts articles, email capture and an editor, to, you know, having a business that does 750,000amonth, team of 45. And you know, you now also have like a full ad revenue stream in addition to SaaS. 1. One question and then I want to kind of talk through what's gotten you to this point is in your best case scenario, does the advertising business, because of the network you're building, end up being bigger than the actual SaaS revenue or do you like, do you have a point of view on that?

Yeah, I've Always said from day one that I believe the ad network revenue should be significantly larger than the SaaS revenue. Right now. That's not the case. I think 80, 85% of our revenue is SaaS. But that's because a few things. One, the ad network we launched, I'd say about like eight months ago. We started off, the ad network itself had an mvp, which was an MVP for a while. We were basically running an agency internally. So we knew all the newsletters, we knew all of their metrics, we knew who was advertising. We then went in the market to advertisers being like, hey, do you want to advertise? Same pitch to the advertisers. But the way in which we were actually facilitating the ads was just our CEO emailing the newsletter, saying, here's an opportunity for an ad. This is how much they're willing to pay. If they said yes, we would just email them the copy and the link and then we would manually go into their account later, pull all the metrics, send it back to the advertiser. So it's basically an agency with the advantage of we had all the first party data and access to the newsletters, who were monetizing. And I mean, again, the pitch to the advertisers was the same. We ran that for about eight months. So proof of concept, I mean, interest on both sides very obviously. So that hypothesis was confirmed simultaneously while doing that mvp. We were building the tech to facilitate that. So the tech launched about two months ago and it's essentially from a workflow perspective. We close deals for advertisers, we understand their target audience, we have an admin panel. We provision ads to thousands of different newsletters. They get a notification saying brand X wants to advertise in your newsletter. Based on historical data, we think you're going to get paid $750 for this advertisement. Do you want to run it? You can accept it, you can schedule it. We know when you're scheduling it, it becomes available in the editor. So you can just choose. Like on that day, I want to run this advertisement. You drop it wherever you want. We automate all the reporting, clicking, tracking everything, and then over time we understand all the newsletters, which ones are actually performing better for different categories. So if newsletter A crushes it for D2C but is terrible for health and fitness, then we'll continue to dish them B2C ads because ultimately our goal is to return the greatest investment for the advertisers. So it's one big continuous optimization problem and big data solution where we're constantly optimizing who's getting what types of ads. So all of that to say is we're still very, very early in the ad network, but this launched like two months ago. And I think, you know, the upside, like morning brew, let's say hypothetically, is doing 20 million in revenue. A few years ago, if we were actually the ARM and like the process, that instead of you having a sales team, hypothetically, you depended on Beehive for ad revenue, and we were taking anywhere between 20 and 30% of ad revenue. If there's X amount of morning brews. There aren't, but there's the long tail adds up to many morning brews. Could we take 20 to 30% of 100 to $200 million of ad spend over time and that's what we're building?

Yeah, totally. I think that actually the most interesting part of what you just described is I feel like historically I've seen just a kind of a desire for people who are naturally technical to kind of have this excitement to overbuild very quickly. And I think just the fact, you know, basically, you know, obviously you've always wanted to build out this, whatever you call programmatic ad network for newsletters. But, like, you didn't start by just building out a product to mvp. You literally just like, launched it as an agency business to actually see, is there demand here? Can we sell across the network? Can we, like, slice by cohorts in a way that is attractive to brands? And then you build into the product. I feel like that's a really good lesson for people who are. Who are used to just building software. Yeah.

I'd also say there's a lot of assumptions I made before we even launched that MVP that were proven incorrect. And so if we would have spent, I mean, my job primarily, I'd say the most important thing I do is protect the engineer's time and make sure that they aren't building things that are either incorrect or not the most prioritized thing that we should be building. The worst thing I could do is tell an engineer to build something, they spend two weeks of their time building it, and it ends up being incorrect or just not useful to our audience. And so what doing this MVP allowed us to do is, like, there's certain things that newsletters expected that I didn't expect that we weren't going to initially build into the product by after doing it for eight months manually. We learned different processes to implement. We also understood different data points, different pain points that both advertisers and newsletters were having that weren't anywhere close to the roadmap that I had initially thought we would build. So I think it's like a classic like for all walk run.

Yep.

Maybe in that order. Where it's like best to understand like what the process is manually. The downside is I think as a lot of product and engineering minded people, they always want the most efficient process. And the thought of having to do something as manual as like scraping emails, sorting them in a CSV, trying to find like the right newsletter to target and then emailing them like mind boggling back. It's such. It is a really shitty process but you kind of have to go through that to learn how things should work and like what the inefficiencies are.

Totally. I want to ask now about certain aspects of things that you have done as an entrepreneur as well as what the business has done that I view as like pivotal decisions or initiatives that kind of bridge this gap between starting the business two and a half years ago and where you are today. The first is around early team. Right. Like you mentioned that you felt really good about the early team at Morning Brew. And the other thing that you mentioned, which I completely agree with, is like you had an ownership mentality at the Brew, like you worked like you were a co founder in the business. And I think in some ways, you know, Austin and I had good intuition because I also think one of the best ways to hire people is like consulting or contractor to full time because there's just no better interview process than seeing someone's work. But also, I think we were lucky in a lot of ways. When you think about finding kind of like your version of Tyler Dank within Beehive in the early days, how did you try to find those people? And even if you like think about who are your few best early employees, what are kind of the, like the, the patterns you identify in those people?

Yeah, I'd say there's a few things. One, like me and my two co founders are all technical. So our core founding team were three engineers who at you kind of have to like same way you would hire in terms of priority and like what needs to get done today. The first thing that you need to do is like build the actual product and the fact that we didn't like bring on people who might be good at marketing and partnerships in the future. But like the zero to one is nothing but 12 months of building. So me and my two co founders were heads down coding for the first 12 months to build V1 and the MVP of the product. I think in terms of like having an ownership mentality, I think you kind of hit it on the head in terms of like the contract to hire, something I'm a huge fan of. I'd say probably about a dozen of our hires now that are full time started on contract doing some sort of work for us both. I think it de risks entirely, right. You get to see exactly how they work, you get to see how they communicate in Slack, how they respond to feedback and what they would be before you actually go through the process of offering a full time job. So we've done that with a ton of hires. And then also equity is kind of like the startup golden nugget that I think everyone talks about. That's like what really does turn employees into owners, quite literally. And so by being able to give them a piece of the company and show them what the potential upside can look like by having prior work experience. So like Austin had worked with me previously, I worked for three to four months over the summer kind of proving my worth. Like at any point I could have dropped the ball or not done a great job and he wanted to move forward with hiring me totally. So I think there's a mix between aligned visions, aligned values in terms of like who the people are. There's something about giving them ownership, like actual ownership in the business so they're fully bought in from day one and want to build something meaningful long term. And then there's like a prior work history of having some sort of proof of concept that they are the type of person you want to work with. But it's hard, right? I think that's probably we've been very fortunate. We were very fortunate at Morning Brew as well. The amount of companies I think blow up or have unforeseen issues due to co founders fighting or early employee issues is not insignificant. And so that's something that I've always overlooked because I mean I've actually never really fought with my co founders thankfully, which actually is probably unhealthy. I think there has to be some level of fighting and arguing. But yeah, I think it's really common in startups and you have to be really careful about who you're building your business with. And the early employees are so important. Whenever I talk about morning bruising experience in my life, one of the first things that jumps out is our first 10 to 15 hires were so smart, so talented, so driven and like really fun to work with and be around. And that is something I think that's Fairly uncommon for most companies. And it goes a long way in building the foundation for the rest of the business.

Totally. Yeah. And it's honestly, it's one of the things I feel most grateful for to this day. And it's also why, you know, it's so cool to see kind of like all the things that people in that first 10 crowd did post morning brew as well. Like I think that that's kind of like the best feeling is like obviously we still have ways to go and building like the PayPal mafia, but thinking about like the morning brew mafia and then ultimately when you think about like the beehive mafia, I feel like that is like one of the coolest feelings you can ultimately have. Talk about your first five hires. So what exactly were your first five hires? And just quickly kind of rattle off like why each one of those hires made so much sense at the time when you hired them.

Yeah, so it's me, Ben and Jake are the initial co founders. Three, like I said, three technical engineers. We hired a cto, Andrew Plackin, who came in as more of like a senior leader on the team. And so we were three, my two co founders. Both Ben and Jake are two years or three years younger than me. And Andrew's been in the startup space for I think about 10 plus years. So had like a level of senior leadership and again like the 0 to 1, we just needed to build and ship products very quickly and so he served that purpose. And then the team quickly became just like four engineers. And like as you grow a business and start to prepare for launch, there's other things outside of building like customer support, marketing growth. And so we brought on someone to handle kind of like miscellaneous just across the spectrum from answering, custom support, building some sort of like support documentation, answering people on Twitter and LinkedIn or whatever.

Kind of like, like just like the five tool like operational person just there's.

Engineering, which is still like 80% of her business and then there's everything else. And yeah, and she was in everything else hire then from there I'd say we were always on the lookout for engineers and still are to this day. It's like one of the core philosophies we've always had part of it's being in a very competitive industry. But we are newcomers in an extremely, extremely competitive industry with dozens of well funded established companies. And our biggest disadvantage still to this day, but definitely at the beginning was we were the least developed, furthest behind in every possible aspect of like an enterprise, esp. So we would go to established senders like a morning brew and be like, hey, do you want to use us? And you don't have these 25 features. And so like you just very much had to prioritize building and shipping quality product. So we were always on the lookout for engineers and are very product and engineering heavy as a company today. And our first 10 hires, I think six or seven were engineers. Beyond the everything else hire, we eventually hired a specific growth person. So someone who was like, here's the KPIs. We want to continue growing. Whether that's paid acquisition, whether that's partner program, whether that's SEO. You come up with the roadmap that's going to take us from $100Mrr to $100,000 Mrr. And then from there we, everyone was like stretched thin in terms of like support eventually became a function. But I'd say up until the series A outside of engineering it was everyone wearing multiple hats. So our growth guy was also answering customer support questions and also doing like actual blog pieces and content creation. I was doing everything from product management to helping out on engineering to doing growth initiatives to answering customer support every night. I think that changed with this series A where then you take a step back and you realize who's actually doing four different jobs, which is impossible to do four full time jobs 100%. It ended up being people doing four different jobs, like a six out of 10 each. And that's where we took a step back and was like, how can we hire? So we have one person doing one thing, a 10 out of 10 which just completely changed our ability to execute.

And do you out of curiosity, do you write code anymore? Like what do you spend your time on today?

I not at all writing code right now. I'm like pretty heavily involved in products. So I am. We have a PM as well, full time. That helps me with this because part of us being able to launch features very quickly is we have a team of 12 engineers. And like another not a secret, but.

That'S basically so 25% of your headcount right now is straight up engineers.

Straight up engineers. And like one of the cheat codes, I mean people always ask me like how do you ship products so quickly? And there's like a few things to that. One is we don't have separate front end and back end engineers. We have full stack engineers top to bottom. And so we don't have like a front end engineer being like hey, I'm waiting on the back end team to finish this. Vice versa, we don't have back end engineers waiting on a front end. Everyone owns the entire thing from front end, back end testing, QA and shipping. So that's been like a huge unlock in terms of like engineering efficiency. Like there's no latency, there's.

Is that unorthodox in a software business.

I think as you scale and like what people are used to is having more specialties, like kind of as you do as any business. Like early stage businesses have many people that wear multiple different hats. As you scale to 100, 200, 300 employees, you have someone who's like just SEO focused and nothing else. Someone who's like just front end developer focused and is the best at building front end designs. But they're so good at that because they haven't focused a lot of their career on back end development. And so I think depending on where you're coming from in your career, you see that happen in larger organizations and try to imitate like hey, let's hire like a killer front end engineer or like the truth is for early stage businesses it's really hard to recruit early days when you don't have that much revenue, you don't have that much traction, no one knows who you are. And so you end up start reaching for people. And so you might say we have all these ambitions to launch whatever, we don't have an engineer to build it. I know this one guy who's okay on back end but really good at front end. But you don't have a massive talent pool to hire from, so you're like, okay, let's just make that higher. And now you've just handicapped yourself in a way that you have a front end engineer who actually isn't that great on backend and you're eventually going to run into the problem where you need to fill that void by hiring a backend engineer. So there's a lot of things we did very intentionally. And again, I think we're also fortunate because both my co founders are incredible engineers who are front and back end. So Full Stack Andrew Plack and Full Stack. Our first three hires all Full stack engineers and so we never had the latency of waiting on a different team is 1, 2. We're also very fortunate, which I'd say most engineers stereotypically aren't the best design focused and product focused. But our engineers, I'd say our first eight engineers, no offense to the ninth one, I'm just guessing. I think our first eight engineers are incredibly design minded. So we didn't hire a product designer until two Weeks ago, we. I didn't even build, I didn't really build mockups or like sketches in Figma until like halfway through, like the business I just said, here's how something needs to work. And they had the enough intuitiveness for design to build something that worked really well. And so that's another big advantage where we didn't have blockers there on that.

Also say just for a second because I'm sure you, you feel this way about your engineers. It feels like you've just like you keep trying to hire unicorns and you somehow find unicorns. Like, it sounds like hiring great full stack engineers who are so good at thinking about design that you can delay thinking about a product designer while also building really scalable backend tech. Like, it just sounds very, very difficult. While you're also competing against much larger, better funded tech companies. Is there any kind of like, method to the madness on how you've gone about recruiting that's either different or something you haven't seen companies do? Or you just like the world's best salesperson for engineers? Like, what, what's allowed you to do that?

Definitely not the world's best. I'd say it took us, I mean, we're constantly looking for top talented engineers. It's taken us two years to get the 12 engineers that we have. And so it's, I mean, we, and I owe a ton of credit to our early engineering team. There were times where I was like, hey, we need to move faster, we need to hire engineers. Here's someone who I think is good enough. And they always push back, being like, I don't think they're the perfect fit for xyz. Reason to which me as like the CEO, trying to push out features and promise all these things to our users that are coming, but they're not coming because we don't have enough bandwidth to build them. Would always get super frustrated. Like, don't you think this person's good enough to hire? And they were pretty relentless in being like, it's just such a efficiency and bandwidth drag to have quote unquote, lower quality engineers bring down the bandwidth of the team because that requires other engineers to clean up their code or like have to review it even more thoroughly. And so yes, it sounds like we do have a bunch of unicorns in our team and they're great. But it took us two years of like slowly adding one engineer a quarter to find it.

And it sounds like, it sounds like you didn't concede, like any time you didn't feel exceptional you, you, it seems like you were pretty disciplined about like not rushing a hire for the sake of getting a butt in a seat.

Yeah. So I think the three things in terms of like hiring early engineers that were like a secret sauce for us were one, like front end, back end, like full stack engineers, like what we went on, incredible design intuitiveness. So they. I didn't have to spend my time building mockups. They knew what to build and part of that is become because of the third reason, which is the competence in this domain area. So Ben and Jake worked at Morning Brewing. They understood what like the core infrastructural tech was in the sense that I don't need to explain to the engineer our users want to do X and this is how it should work. Like they knew exactly who our users were and what they were expecting. So it reduced like them building the wrong thing and it reduced the need for PM or me to step in and have to over explain everything.

Got it. The next thing I want to talk about that I think you know, and I think you'd agree was like super pivotal in just the trajectory over the last two and a half years is just like the. And I, I keep using this word and I'm gonna stop using it after I use it in this very moment, which is like the zeitgeistiness of the brand. Like, like there's. There's very much like a. It feels like. Actually it feels like morning brew at a point. Right. Like when. More when we were on our rise with the brew. Right. It felt like there was like an aura around the brand and that's how. How Beehive feels right now. And I even saw like you, you put out on X 6 days ago how you guys were like number one most promising consumer startup on the information. Like there's just like a lot of buzz, pun intended around the brand right now. How I have thoughts on why that is, but what is kind of your estimation of intentional choices you have made that have led to being in the zeitgeist?

Yeah, it's a very loaded question because there's a lot of things that I think I've done, some consciously, some unconsciously to be able to make that happen. One was, I think what you're alluding to is building in public, which I'm a huge fan of for a lot of different reasons. But one in particular is I think people align with people over brands. And I never necessarily wanted to be the face of Beyve, but I thought there was something interesting in being able to tell Our story to attract early users and be the face where partially because we didn't have a customer support function so they could just DM me and come to me, but partially because we knew where our users were, a lot of our early adopters were on Twitter. That's somewhere that I'm confident in writing thought pieces or tweets about what's working, what's not working, how we're growing, how we're prioritizing different things. And so I have kind of become a face of a brand and sharing our success. I've also relentlessly answered every single DM possible from LinkedIn and Twitter because I think, again, early days, it's a super competitive space. I'm doing anything to stand out. And I believe, and still believe to this day, if someone's choosing between three different platforms and I'm in their DMs, talking with them, actually hearing out their pain points, and I also have the engineering team to be like, oh, that's actually a really interesting point. We'll build that for you next week. And like, early scrappiness of just like being able to get shit done and show that I'm actually listening to them, I think goes a long way. And it also compounds, right? So those early experiences, and I still do it to this day of listening to our users and building things for them goes a long way in building trust with our core early users. I mean, part of it's like desperation, right? Like at early days, like, there's nothing guaranteed and I'm willing to, the same way that you would go up to go to any company's front door or front office to, like, try to get a sales deal. I will stay up all night answering DMs and listening to our users if it means a 10% chance that they might move off of another platform to move to ours. And as you do that and start to compound, there's more of a narrative and aura built around the brand of. Here's a brand of the narrative that we're creating, which is early morning brew employees who help scale and build the brew. So there's a proven track record of success and confidence in what we're doing. Yes, we haven't built a multibillion dollar SaaS company before, but our focus is building and scaling successful newsletters. And we know that better than anyone else. So part of it is like being able to communicate that in lieu of everything that we don't have, right? We don't have the flashiest possible growing there. But like day one, we don't have a banner of the top brands that are using us because we were new. We don't have the track record of millions of success stories. But what we do have and what we need to lean on and almost over index on is the narrative and the story that we know the space better than anyone else. And the only way you can create that narrative is by repeating it and highlighting what you are doing to as many people as you possibly can.

Yeah, it's super interesting because. Yeah, I mean that. That was a similar thing I was going to say, which is like you're just constantly out there. And again, it feels so similar to like early days of the Brew. Like in the same way we would be responding to everyone in the inbox or Neil Wood. Like you're doing the same thing for prospective customers. And it's actually such a fascinating thing that like, especially with so many of these products that the actual product features at a certain point will be commoditized if they're not already. Where there's like you get to a point of, of like feature parity across things. Like the. Just the notion of even today, actually, especially today, where Beehive is better known of like the c. CEO of Beehive talking to a prospective customer and they're like, yeah, I would use your platform but I don't have this. The fact they even hear back from you is a win if they hear back from you and they're like. And you're like, oh yeah, we're building that and it's going to be done in the next two weeks. It's like, how do they say no to you when you're the only platform that they've experienced that kind of touch point with.

Yeah, I'll say a lot. It's like against the two things I think we really nailed down is like building the narrative and then social proof. And you kind of have neither of those in the very beginning. And so as we're building social proof, we have a few of our early adopters move over. They hit a few different milestones they say went from 500 subscribers to a thousand in a month and beyond. Like, amazing platform. So one, I retweet that from both the company account and my account for a few different reasons. One, it shows the broader audience on that platform that yes, Beehive's a thing. Yes, it works. And here's a proof point of it working for someone. Two, it builds some brand affinity with that individual person that they're being seen and being heard and that they're being elevated by both me and the brand. And then you see other people see that and they're like, wait, so if I move to Beehive and then I start having success, then I tweeted them, maybe they'll repost me to their 25, 50,000 people. And then it just becomes like a virtuous cycle where people now see us promoting people having success on our platform, which just promotes more people wanting to tweet at us and promote their success, which just promotes more social proof points of our product working and doing what it's supposed to do. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast, we Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move, having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

Before we talk about kind of like the next kind of key part of the business, I, I do want to just focus on this a little bit more because I think we've talked about the output, which is like you talk about the business in public a lot. You almost treat your product feature, new product features or product drops. Like, I, I liken it to like supreme doing limited clothing drops or like, you know, Shopify now has kind of like their episodes that they do on Twitter. But there's a lot I would think that has to happen in the back end to like make the buzz machine work. Like, to me, one thing is like product, how do you like, how do you maintain such a rapid product cadence? And is there actually like, are there milestones you set for how often you want to be improving features to be able to announce them to the world? And then is there like a marketing blitz package that you have every time you do one of these? Talk about that a little bit more.

Yeah, I'd say a few things. So on the product side, we have a quarterly roadmap that I set aside every quarter. So at the end of Q2, we're preparing the Q3 roadmap. It's high level, what I call epics, which are tent pole features that do not currently exist or initiatives of making one feature 10 times better by doing XYZ. So I'd say we have about 80% of the roadmap mapped out of exactly what we want to build in the upcoming quarter, which is then broken down like the smaller pieces of. In order to launch feature X, we have to do feature Y first because it unblocks this. And then I'd say we leave about like 15 to 20% open for feedback. Where whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn or users writing into support, there's constantly different use cases that we are understanding that we need to improve on. And it's been our core advantage going back to what we were just talking about, to be able to listen to users, make them feel heard and prioritize what they want us to build. And so I'd say it's about 80, 20 pre built each quarter and 20% listening to feedback and building there. In terms of the hype cycle, that again came from very early days. We had four engineers and the only thing we could do was ship product. And a lot of it actually comes from the insecurity of day one. We had the least features of any given product. So how do you take a user who's using Mailchimp and is used to these 20 features being available and convince them that they should turn off of mailchimp to use our product, even though we have nothing that mailchimp has? And there's a few different ways that you have to do that. One is like, we have carved out the niche of like newsletters first. And so mailchimp sell through campaign monitor. Like a lot of these classic, like traditional ESPs are actually built around e commerce and marketing, which is probably what most email is used for. So we carved out the niche again. Our confidence is morning brew. We know how to build content first. Newsletters as a product, if that's what you're trying to do and you're trying to fit a round page into a square hole and doing that on one of these other email platforms, we can serve you better then the other thing is if you do move over, you might see that we're missing the core 15 features that you're used to. So what we have to do to overcompensate for that is show you that we are going to relentlessly launch features as quickly as possible to build again. It's all about building narrative for us. Their narrative is we launch features every single week, which should communicate to our audience and prospective audience. If you want something that we currently don't have, odds are it's coming and coming very quickly because we have the proven track record of shipping product very quickly. So it's totally born out of insecurity. Right. Like if we were market leaders, I wouldn't feel the need to so relentlessly push out product. But it's both one. I mean I also wake up with the anxiety every day less so now, but initially that users were unsatisfied with our product early on and they wanted to turn to go to another product that was more built out. So I had to get that product update out on a Wednesday to then educate our current users. Like all these things that you've been complaining and dming me about that don't currently exist now exist. So it's a retention mechanism for current users, it's a marketing mechanism for potential users that this is now possible. So if they were previously interested in using Beehive, but this was a blocker that we didn't have it, you now communicate to the market broadly that this is now available. And then it also just throws you on the radar of things that could potentially come down the line because of our cadence and ability to launch features. So yeah, that's kind of like where that was born from and they still do it today.

And then what's like the blitz package? Anytime a weekly product feature drops is it what's happening is a tweet going out on your account. On Beehive's account. Like I feel like I've also seen like really well edited short form videos. Like what is kind of the package.

Yeah, so it's definitely evolved. It's always been an email. So the email again serves that first purpose of educating current users. So now that they know that existing can use it previously so they wouldn't churn. Yeah, but the email is one. And then again our product sends an email and post to the website. So we have the web post as well. We would typically promote that on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, that this now exists. So that is again we did the retention part just as for marketing and just communicating to the prospective audience that this now exists on our platform. Since we've gotten a little bit further along, this blitz package, which is what we're calling it now, we have like animated videos as well because I think a lot of people are too lazy to click through and read the actual product update.

Yep.

So how can we see summarize what features just launched in a quick animated video? So we have that and then we also now have tutorials. So you've now educated me that it exists. You can maybe gave a use case. But again a lot of people are lazy. How can you show me a tutorial of someone walking through in the platform exactly how to set it up and how like there's a difference between this exists and this is why you should care. Which is really just product marketing and something I think we've been okay app to get better. Is one saying that this feature now is there is good for people who are familiar with that feature and know that that should matter. But there's a part of product marketing of being able to break down like why does that matter to your core users that don't care about the feature, they care about the output. And so being able to change your marketing to be more value based and output based versus functionality based is a big shift that we're trying to focus a lot more attention on.

Totally. And I feel like in General, whenever a B2B company has their marketing feel like a consumer company, things generally head in a good direction. I feel like that's what you guys have been able to do really well. One more thing I want to talk about and then I want to finish our conversation kind of with things focused about you. Like you as a founder, you as a person is the final thing is around running your company remote. Obviously like when we were at the brew, we loved being in person. It's all we knew. I remember Austin, I talked about, would we ever think about having like a satellite office for the longest time we wouldn't because it just felt like another variable that we'd have to think about at a time when we were first time founders and we're like, we, we can barely just do this. Well, how obviously I know you love running a remote company now how. But how do you think about really intentionally curating the culture or the communication in a way that like the risks of remote culture don't hold you back. And I asked that also through the lens of like it's very easy to have a great culture when shit is going well, which everything has generally felt like it's gone well with Beehive over the last two and a half years. How do you set things up in a way where people still rally around you and the company when shit doesn't go well?

Yeah. Fortunately they're like most things have gone well. Right. So it's like it's to be seen the contestant of the culture and everything. We've built in more tumultuous times, which we've had lots of tumultuous times.

Yeah.

I'd say one thing that we do is one like over communicate. Everything is like key. So I'd say every Sunday I send a huge deep dive of an email of everything going on in my head in terms of what products are being Built right now. When are we trying to launch them? What are the core initiatives for marketing and growth this upcoming week? What are the core initiatives for support? What are the different KPIs we're focusing on? What are other general things happening in the business? Because as a remote company you have a lot less, less touch points of running into someone during lunch or like at the water cooler, quote, unquote. Right? So, so there's like a difference in terms of like you kind of have to force those conversations so everyone knows what people are working on elsewhere in the business. And I am super meticulous on over communicating to a fault of everything going on, which does a few different things. There's one, you want to align everyone they have, they know where they are in the ecosystem and how it plays into the larger picture. So like the last thing you want is someone like feeling very trapped and narrow on like a individual initiative without knowing that what you're building is actually part of this much larger initiative which is going to allow us to compete with these five companies which is going to unlock X amount of growth in revenue and everything else. So one is over communication. Two is being able to clearly communicate everyone's piece in the larger puzzle and how we're building and all kind of swimming in the same direction. Another is like really being purposeful in how we shout out people and promote the success of what everyone's working on. I think it's overlooked the power of recognition and what it means to be able to say like, hey, we just solved eight different problems. You know, enterprise customer problems, like give shout outs like very thoroughly to everyone who's like building different things and making sure that people feel recognized in what they're doing.

And how do you do that? Typically is it in all hands, is it over Slack, like what is your method for doing it or is it all over the place and it's just constantly top of mind for you?

Definitely the latter. But like we have a kudos channel and Slack where everyone, we have a huge culture. Everyone like who goes out of their way to help out someone else in the business giving a shout out there. Anytime we launch features, there's typically seven or eight people from the engineers, the product manager, the designer, the marketer, the tutorial, the knowledge base, articles for support. Like there's like nine or 10 people involved in every single launch. They get shouted out every time. There's a lot in terms of like building the camaraderie of the team and making sure that people feel noticed and like aren't Being ignored in a broader, somewhat isolating environment of being totally remote and having very few IRL touch points with other employees that you're working with. I'd also say, like after the series, a one thing that became really obvious, we went from 20 employees to 45 employees very quickly. And so your first 15, 20 employees know everything. They know exactly what every person does in the company. They know exactly what their role is, who's building, what the historical context for why this works this way, or why we do certain things. And that breaks down when you hire very quickly. And so what we've done is we have an all hands Monday, Friday, like full team all hands.

We have two all hands a week.

We have two all hands a week. And we also, which is it's getting to the breaking point. But everyone talks at the all hands. We haven't broken it up. We're only the department leads. So for example, on Mondays we do what's your top priority of the week? And then usually like a fun prompt of like, I don't know, who's your favorite artist? Or like, what's your favorite location that you've traveled? So it's twofold. One is the what's your top priority? So everyone knows what everyone's working on this specific week, which over time you understand, like what niches different people are operating in within the business. And also what is supposed to get done this week. The second prompt of who's your favorite artist? Or what's your favorite vacation destination? Shows a bit more personality, where then you're like, you can DM them on the side, like, hey, I also went to Aruba, I love that place, or whatever. So it's kind of like fostering relationships, going, showing personality and all 45 people talk at all hands. On Monday and Friday, we also, in the second half of these, all hands do a demo or context sharing. So whether it's like, hey, we just launched this feature, this engineer is going to walk through exactly how it works, or this is how we typically do sales at the company. And this is like a sales deck, just so we're constantly sharing as much context as possible so everyone knows how different things work at the company. And then we just implemented a lunch and learn bi weekly where for an hour I will go deep on the competitive landscape of the space and how we're winning, how we're losing in certain areas, or the referral program, how it actually works, which then educates the support team, answer questions and also just gives more context to everyone else of a core feature. In our platform. So to summarize, I'd say just overemphasizing, giving shout outs and kudos and making sure everyone knows the part that they're playing in the company so no one feels like they're not a part of the broader picture.

Over.

Communicating and then context sharing have kind of been like the big three for me.

Random question, have you, do you have anyone in HR at the company yet?

Yeah, so we have one people ops manager. We hired her coincidentally like two weeks before series A, which was like the greatest timing of all.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. Something I always think about is like when is the right time to, to hire people ops for hr? And generally you end up hiring later than you would have liked to. I know like at the brew it like if one thing, if I could change in retrospect is just hiring HR super early because it's just like at the end of the day so much complexity happens with each additional person and ultimately if you're doing your job right, you have to handle that complexity. But that's all that time like pulled away from other parts of the business.

I think the thing that everyone shares is like, I wish that I hired HR sooner, especially as a remote company. I think there's like you typically think HR is like problems or like arguments or like solving different like sexual harassment in the office. Like how do we deal with that? Ideally HR would handle that. So I think almost as like a remote first company, you kind of push that higher off a bit more. Thinking like, we don't have an office, we don't have like supplies, we don't have like in real life events and experiences that could cause issues. But what I realized when we needed to hire HR was we would have someone starting on Monday. And I realized at 8 o' clock on Sunday night that they were starting and like I am hr. So I was like, shit, I need to get them access to Slack, I need to get them access to the credit cards and to get them access to like a beehive email. Like I was spending two to three hours on a Sunday night after forgetting that they were even starting, that I needed to get them situated and everything. And so I think that was a breaking point. And any time obviously you're going to go like aggressively hiring people. Like we could not have doubled the team with me running H R. And so like those are two kind of like breaking points. I'd say 100%.

Okay. The last section of questions I just want to ask is about you. So like you know, we've talked about what I think are really important parts about the business that have allowed you to grow. Now I want to talk about like aspects of you, decisions you've had to make, how you've evolved that has enabled the business to grow as well. First one is how do you think you have changed as a founder from let's call it like when you last co founded a business which was venturestorm to now? What do you think is different about just like the way your, your brain thinks or how you're running this business that is setting everything up for more success?

I think as a founder you have to be very good at protecting your time and prioritizing. I think early days both in my career and starting the business, anytime someone somewhat interesting wanted to talk to me, I thought that was the coolest thing. I was like, of course I'll take a 30 minute call and like maybe there's some world where we can help each other out or you could provide value. What has changed a lot is I say no to like 95% of things you asked earlier about like this podcast that I've been on a decent amount of podcasts, I actually say no to probably 90% of podcasts, the ones I say yes to are either because they have a large audience. I think the halo effect of being able to tell my story and communicate and get in front of net new people could lead to more business. So it's strategic in audience size or a lot of times they're like beehive users and just like going through the narrative of being to support our own users. I'll go on the podcast to support them, but I don't know. One of the things that I do, I feel like somewhat unconventionally is a lot of investors reach out as we've had more and more success of hey, would love to develop the relationship, like let's get 30 minutes on the calendar. Decently big name investors and I relentlessly just go, we're heads down building right now. If I said yes to every meeting that came across my plate, then no one would want to have a meeting with me, right? Like I'm relentlessly saying no so I can focus on business and if I keep doing that, they'll still want to talk to me. I think a lot of entrepreneurs think like if I don't take this opportunity to nurture the relationship with these investors, then I don't have the opportunity to maybe raise money in the future. I think of it completely opposite. If you're heads down building and actually Executing the business and growing it. Those investors will be that much hungrier to speak to you in the future than if you took a 30 minute call with them now.

Totally. Yeah. It just sounds like you've gotten super disciplined with how you spend your time, which obviously is really important and it's obvious, but very hard to do. Especially as like the things pulling for your attention as a founder increase. As like just kind of the, the brand and the excitement around the business increases. How do you think about your, your weaknesses? So just like what do you think your biggest efficiencies are as a founder and what are things you've done either via hiring, via coaching, working on yourself, etc, to just not have whatever those deficiencies are, hold back the business.

Yeah, I'd say my number one deficiency is like at the end of the day, I'm a people person. I love people, I love talking to people, I like building relationships. And unfortunately, as you scale a business like you hire people and whether it's the wrong person or the wrong position or the wrong timing, not everyone works out. And so I think the worst thing you can do, the best thing I can do as a CEO is hire the right people to put everyone in a position to succeed and be better at their job. And it's unfair to them to have people who aren't pulling their weight continue to be a part of the business and dragging everyone down at the same time. I have a relationship with all these individual people and like want things to work out. Obviously in extending an offer, you had a vision for it working out and you thought and you believe that it would. And so I'd say both firing is extremely difficult every time and then even before firing, being able to have a good rap with everyone on the team, but also be able to communicate negative feedback in terms of things that they could be doing better. It's always like a very delicate balance. So I'd say just in general, just people management. Like what you realize as you scale a company is like the actual building the software and building processes is actually the easiest part of scaling a business at a point. It's the people problem of having people continue to perform at a high level, continue to execute to the level that you expect them to, and to manage the miscellaneous things that people feeling entitled about higher salaries or promotions and how to keep people who you may not believe are deserving of promotion yet still motivated when you tell them that is like the hardest part of building a business.

And out of curiosity, like, if you've reflected on kind of any of the fires you've had to make, what sort of lessons have you learned of basically where you messed up that can inform future hires you make? Like, for people you've had to fire, if you take full accountability for it, like, what are mistakes you made?

Yeah, there's a few. One, like, as we started with, I think the contract to hire will de risk most of these entirely. Everyone that we have fired was like a. We did a few rounds of interviews, gave them an offer. I had no experience of how they handled adversity, communication, how they actually executed, and did their job function in, like, a real setting, just in the hypotheticals of an interview. So anytime that it's possible to do a contract to hire, I think it de risks pretty considerably. I'd also say one of the first. The first person I ever fired, I actually texted Austin funny enough, and I was like, hey, so I think I need to fire this person. Like, underperforming, holding back the company. The thing is, like, it's going to be a total blindside. Like, she doesn't know it's coming. And I was like, what do I do? And Austin's like, it should never be a total blindside. Like, they should see it coming from a mile away because you've already been communicating every single week. Here's the expectations, and you're either hitting them or you're not. And after X amount of weeks of not hitting expectations, like, they should see the writing on the wall that it's just not working out. So that, I mean, we proceeded with that firing, but from that point forward, it's been a huge learning experience of, like, what you should never do. The second someone is skewing towards underperforming, you should be able to communicate that pretty effectively. So there's never someone who is unexpectedly fired.

Totally. Okay, a few more questions for you, and then I'll let you enjoy Costa Rica. What has been the hardest conversation you've had to have in the two and a half years of running the business? Single hardest conversation.

Yeah, Honestly, probably the hardest conversation I've had in my life was after Andrew Placken passed away. So our cto, who I mentioned earlier, was our CTO for about eight months and, like, genuinely, like, the greatest guy, so smart, unicorn engineer. It's also really hard. I think, obviously there's the emotional aspect and the personal aspect of having a friend pass away is the first time that's ever happened to me. And then it's very difficult to pull apart the personal aspect of that with, like, the business aspect as shitty as it is, because he was like the most important person on our team. And so going from a small, tight knit team of eight people and like we finally started to hit product market fit and escape velocity to him passing away on a Friday over the weekend and then you kind of go back to work on Monday, business as usual, but it's not business as usual. So I'd say showing up to that first all hands on Monday, where there's like only eight of us on the team and now we're seven and there's also like a one it's like obviously terrible situation, but there's also a panic of like now what? Because there's so much confidence of. I mean it's the classic peacetime wartime CEO to the extreme of like a small company that is very limited in resources. We don't have like a ton of domain and expertise sharing across the company, like key own mission critical things. And we had enterprise users emailing us like, hey, this isn't working on Monday. And like, how do you figure that out while going through like the emotional up and down, or mostly down obviously of someone passing away. So I think just showing up to that all hands and being able to one hold my shit together, which I did decently, but also be able to communicate and give the confidence of we're going to find a way through this somehow. And I'm still figuring out what that plan is, but we all kind of need to pick up the slack was a pretty challenging conversation.

Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I remember, I remember when you brought him on and I remember you told me like he was just like the most incredible hire and just incredible at what he did. And Ulster's like an incredible person and I can imagine just how difficult it was to both feel like you were kind of honoring his legacy and the time he spent with the business. Right. Like trying to give that air the airtime it deserved, but also try to have people look forward. Right. It probably felt like a weird thing like, how do I have people look forward when like this happened two or three days ago? And I can imagine that was very difficult.

I mean the hardest thing I think is like operationally the business had to continue doing certain things and in the worst possible time, everyone actually had to work 10 times harder because everything that he owned had to be picked up by someone else and completely learned. So like Ben was learning a new coding language, like day one. So I was basically asking the team to do more and that would be okay. While they were obviously incredibly upset and shaken by the entire thing. So it was like the biggest divergence of like, hey, you have to do more. And like, I almost. I felt bad and guilty in a way, in the sense that I had to put on like a defiant face of like, everything's gonna be fine. Like, I executed kind of like emotionless because it had to get done. But, like, in being emotionless, I look like less human in a way because I wasn't mourning, although I was mourning and the team was mourning. So I mean, that whole time, I'd say like a good, like two months of just kind of browning out. Like how I was able to so wild be. Yeah. So I don't know. But to answer your question, that was by far the most challenging thing I think I've ever done in my life. And to this day, the silver lining in all of it is every other problem that we've encountered since has seemed very minuscule in comparison to that. So when we have had outages or miscellaneous, chaotic things happen at the business.

Feels like the fact that we were.

Able to overcome such a terrible situation seems very minuscule in the grand scheme of things.

Absolutely. I have two more questions for you. The first is, obviously you've talked a lot in the past about, like, and I've seen it obviously firsthand. Like, you work exceptionally hard, you're exceptionally motivated, you're super curious, right? Like, you kind of have to be, especially just going back to college and you know, teaching yourself how to code, right? You have to be kind of a self starter and. And curious. But I'm always just fascinated by what motivates people. And I don't know if you've spent time thinking about what motivates you. I mean, you know, sometimes it serves a purpose, sometimes it doesn't. Do you have a sense of what motivates you? Like, do you have a sense of if it's intrinsic, like, you just like truly love learning and pushing yourself. Do you have a sense of it extrinsic at all? Like, you just want to be rich as or you want to, you know, prove to someone who wronged you in the past, or like there's some chip on your shoulder because of an experience you had? Like, how do you think about what are kind of the few things that contribute to motivating you?

Yeah, it's probably all the above, right? So I am intrinsically motivated because there's so many things I want to do and accomplish. And I think having a successful company, having access to capital, being financially free, gives you a lot of opportunities to pursue things that you're passionate about. And I want to do so many different things in my life where I feel like this is like a great way to be on the path to be able to accomplish those different things. There is extrinsic in terms of like money is great, obviously there's advantageous things about building a successful company and the doors that opens in terms of like personal social life. There is just the competitive nature of. I find like one of the books I loved way back when was like Mark Heughan's book on like the sport of business. But like I grew up playing sports from basketball, soccer, whatever, and the fact that business is so competitive and like there are winners, there's losers, that you can outwork someone, you can outplay someone, you can out strategize people. I think it's just something that I've always been extremely hyper competitive and wanting to be the best at what I do. And at the end of the day, business, there's like real numbers like you, there's a scoreboard and if there's a way that we can build one of the most successful companies in our industry, I think it's like a very fun challenge to pursue. So I don't have like an amazing answer to like true motivations. It's everything from growing up middle to lower class and not having a ton of money growing up. There's everything from my parents being middle class still and we wanting to provide for them as they get older all the way to like the extrinsic, like me, myself, wanting to have money and being super competitive.

Yeah, I mean it's, it sounds like you have a fair bit of self awareness just around kind of what drives you. And I think the thing that's always that I found remarkable and it's why I was saying to someone today, I was talking to someone today and I was talking about angel investing and I was like, I, I, I think I was like, I think Beehive is going to be my best angel investment ever. And I think it's the least amount of due diligence that I've ever done on a single investment. Because I like, I do heavily believe in who are blank check founders, like, who are founders that you would just give a blank check to. Every time they start a company, they just fill out the check with the number. And you, you know, you, you are just betting on like their lifetime career because you're so, you're so confident in their level of motivation and curiosity. And you know, that's what I'VE always found remarkable is just your insatiable curiosity and just kind of like kind of. Again, the thing that makes I think successful founders successful, which is like a little bit of like craziness or naivete of like it's, we're just going to figure it out. Like I don't know what the answer is, but we're just going to figure it out. It's just going to happen and I know it's going to happen and I feel like that's how you kind of think.

Well, I appreciate that.

Yeah, of course. Last question for you because I just find this to be fun. What are one to two business ideas that you have that if you weren't building Beehive today, you'd be interested in building?

There's one idea that I used to be really passionate about, which is I feel like you'd find really interesting just in how you think. But I think the space around death is really interesting. Like it's kind of a taboo type topic that everyone dies. Addressable market is everyone. And I think what came to me was typically when you think of grandparents passing away, you only knew them in like their elder state of when they were older, maybe they were in a wheelchair. Like maybe they were like dying over the last few years of their life slowly. And like your memories of them is like that's all you've ever known of like your grandfather or grandmother. But there was some point when your grandfather was like 20 years old and the man and cool and like just like an interesting person that you never actually got to meet or experience and depending. And maybe it's like with the age of technology is changing now that everyone's documenting their life so on Instagram and TikTok and everything else. But like I would have loved to see my grandparents at a younger age in their life and something around like a time capsule slash like I don't know. Death is obviously sad and terrible, but being able to like celebrate someone's life when they pass away and being able to have like a glimpse of what these people were like earlier in their lives. So it's more of like a celebrated like you saw them in the worst, but you know, they had 70amazing great years before that is like a very like back of the napkin like half baked idea. But I'm interested around like taboo topics that for whatever reason people don't prioritize or think about. But that's like one random idea.

I love it. By the way, after this interview text Austin. He has a fun taboo topic business. He was just pitched on that you'll enjoy. But yeah, I think the idea of memorializing people's lives, there's a number of businesses that do it. I don't know how strong of businesses they are. I actually know Andrew Wilkinson is a big investor in one of them. But like, I, yeah, I've thought a lot about this ever since my dad passed of like, how amazing it would be to like, really be able to relive kind of his first 46 years of life. And I literally got an email today from a company that's opening a New York City studio where every, every year you can go into the studio and have a private interview done. And then basically a database is made of all of your previous interviews that you can unlock from. For family members. Right.

It's something like that where I can imagine like doing a every five years or 10 years, like video interview and like adding assets or. I don't know.

I love it, it looks like.

But yeah, I think it's super interesting.

Love it. Tyler Dank, thank you so much for joining Founders Journal. Appreciate the time, Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

What an awesome conversation with my friend Tyler Dank. If you got to this point in the episode, it means you got some serious value from the interview, which I'm excited, extremely grateful for. It also means I'd love your recommendations for future Founders Journal guests. What startup founder or investor would be a dream for you to hear on my podcast? Shoot me an email to Alex Morning Broadcom and let me know. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.

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