Inside the [Hive] Mind of beehiiv’s CEO, Tyler Denk

Shared everything from key hires to decisions we've made to revenue milestones. 100k MRR, 500k MRR, a million dollars a month in revenue. Tyler Dank, Co founder and CEO at Bey what that has done is one, it's attracted this audience of people who are interested in like a behind the scenes, like oh, I've always seen that company but I don't know how they're operating, what their revenue is. I think people are interested in business, want to know more about businesses and for whatever reason it's a very behind closed door thing where most people don't share it. The flip side of that is every time I would tweet out or share that, hey, we hit 500,000 mrr. One, that attracts a lot of users. Two, I think it attracts a lot of potential employees. So people who are unhappy at their current job but are really talented at engineering or design or whatever, really, they might be at a competitor. But seeing that we're doing really well and have this momentum, you know, if we posted 900k MRR last month and now we're at a million like clear upward trajectory, I think it attracts a lot of really talented and ambitious people. So it's good for users, it's good for employee recruiting and retention and then obviously for investors as well. I've shared this like a few times, but our series A took a week to raise 12 and a half million last year. And then this year our series B where we raised 33 million took two weeks. And a lot of that is because there's no smoke or mirrors, like they don't have to do tons of diligence. I'm already actively sharing everything in public and every time I share a milestone, my inbox and DMs fill with interest. Interest from investors and other people. And so if you're trying to be venture backed or even if you're bootstrapped and just want the legitimacy of more users and more potential hires, I found it incredibly advantageous to share different milestones.

Tyler Bienvenido Founder Z Empanadas.

Yo, yo, what's up?

Really excited to have you on today man.

Super pumped to be here and dive into these, these cheese empanadas, right?

Yes, we got some feta cheese empanadas. Gonzo y castor. Shout out to them.

Not a sponsor. Might be a sponsor now.

Cheers man. Yeah. Salud.

Salud.

We got some good jelly dip here too if you're into that.

A lot drier than I guess what Mark's was last week with The. The spillage. No, no spillage. So far all good.

All good. So, Tyler, we first met at our Costa Rica trip a year ago. I remember there were a couple near death experiences there with the ATVs and the flight over there. And I understand you just recently returned to Costa Rica and ran your mastermind. How's that?

Yeah, so we'll finish eating.

Go for it. Give me a second.

Haven't perfectly timed the eating empanadas while having a conversation, but I'm pretty confident.

I'm going to timing the questions as.

Soon as you take a big bite. Perfect. Yeah. So just did a mastermind in Costa Rica. Obviously very inspired by the trip that we took last October when Mike, who's one of our mutual friends, reached out about organizing the Mastermind. I didn't even know what a mastermind was. I really just love Latin America, love surfing, love getting out of my routine. And so the opportunity to live in this massive house with a bunch of founders and entrepreneurs and work, surf, chill, meet other people was extremely exciting to me. I think that we'd both agree that our experience last October was like 10 out of 10 incredible. Hence me being here in this podcast and us like still talking to this day. And in the past six months, I've also launched a newsletter on my own platform. So Big Desk Energy. Shout Out. Subscribe if you're listening, mail.bigdesk energy.com and so, yeah, I have this community of about 35, 40,000 founders and I wanted to recreate kind of what we were able to do in Costa Rica. So can I hand, select and curate seven founders who come from different backgrounds, different businesses, different industries, different stages of companies, all share from one another, all learn from one another and share resources. And it was great. We surfed six or seven times. I got to meet some really cool people. And I think the other thing that I was very intentional about doing is everyone knows your business really well and your competitors, and I think it's a little boring to just learn from your competitors what they're doing or even in the same industry. So we had people that had agencies, we had SaaS platforms, we had media companies. It was just so interesting to see how other people approach their businesses. And I found that extremely motivating and exciting.

And speaking of Big Dust Energy, check it out, guys. Really good music recommendations.

Yep. Hell yeah.

You recently wrote an essay there about the impact that offshoring has on just improving the quality of lives and wages in emerging countries. I'd love to hear a little bit more about Your experience with outsourcing and how you came about that topic and writing more about it.

Yeah, for sure. So historically my newsletter, which again is only six months old, I usually just share kind of founder strategies, secrets, things that we're doing behind the scenes that most entrepreneurs and startups don't really give full transparency until. So the thesis is a lot of companies that are doing well kind of keep those as internal trade secrets. And I am extremely transparent from building in public and everything else with how we're building the business, how we're hiring, how we're scaling. And the newsletter itself is really a behind the scenes look at the decisions we're making at the company. But through that, and now that I have an audience of 35, whatever thousand people, I have obviously a bunch of other thoughts broader than just the behind the scenes. And so that is my first essay that I wrote I think two or three weeks ago, which is what you're alluding to. And the thought there was, I think so many businesses, 95% plus are traditional in person. You go to an office, you commute, you only hire people in that area. I mean just kind of like how businesses. I think the one silver lining that's been great about COVID if there is anything great about COVID is like the adoption of remote work and more of a globalized workforce, culturally and everything else, just having access to more diverse pools of talent and experiences. And so the thesis of what the essay was, was really one remote work I find incredibly powerful. I think it's a huge competitive advantage that we can open a job role for a graphic designer. And we aren't restricting to anyone who lives and works within 30 miles of Los Angeles, where I live. But we hired someone in India who is so incredibly talented. It's just who is the best person for the job, not who lives close to our headquarters. So I think that's like a massive advantage. In general, we don't pay for an office, people don't spend two plus hours commuting. So like the bullishness on remote work for me is massive. And then going to like expanding on globalization when you can hire talent from around the world. We have 75 employees across 12 to 13 different countries. Now what that does on a company level is we have so many different unique perspectives and skill sets and access to different communities and networks from all of our employees across the world. So that's incredibly advantageous. I think as like a, a holistic company that is serving users around the world. I'd also say, and you could obviously do price arbitrage. And so there's also just like cheaper talent available with offshoring and near shoring. It's kind of a slippery slope. We're pretty down the middle. Like we don't have total price arbitrage. We actually try to pay a lot of our international employees kind of like the going US Rate as well. Some people would argue that from a pure top line, bottom line, it is better to optimize for hiring. And you probably know significantly more about this than I do in terms of finding cheaper talent pools around the world. But there's also something human in like you are doing the same job that we would have hired someone to do in California or New York. And we try to normalize that a bit as well and kind of level the playing field. Which then alludes to the final point of the essay, which really is if we are paying our designers and video graphic designers and engineers in India, in Colombia, in Mexico, the same rate that you would be making in New York or California, what that does is give them more pricing power in those communities. And as more companies are going remote, they're tapping more international employee bases, which is bringing the cost of living up in a lot of different towns and countries, which I think is like super interesting. So very long winded way of saying the emphasis is really just on remote work, global talent pool. And then the second order effects of people making a better wage and living in these different countries and communities and how that can over a long period of time, whether it's decades or centuries, play out to bring more people out of poverty and give them better opportunities. I love that.

Yeah, I really see over the next 20 years global salaries equalizing over time. And that's awesome that you're already paying us equivalent wages. I'm sure they're super committed, super locked in and high level of gratitude too.

Yeah, for sure. I mean it's like one of those things when we look at like the line by line of what everyone is getting paid and you see someone who like we initially just we were younger, we are scrappier, paid an incredible rate in their country, but then stack up against someone who's doing something very similar. And at least how I run the company, which is incredibly transparently, it just feels wrong to have someone who may be even outperforming the person who's getting paid 2x their wage just because of where they live. And so at like a personal leadership level, I feel like that's usually the better thing to do. And that isn't so Again, I think there's two advantages to the remote and global workforce. One could be wages. If you are looking for the arbitrage, which I don't judge anyone who's doing that. This is not what we prioritize. But even just having access to talent in different countries, in different places is a huge unlock.

Absolutely. I'm a big believer that there isn't an inequality of talent, there's an inequality of opportunity. But you can really find some incredible Google level engineers based in Columbia, you name it.

For sure, that was the best quote because I quoted you in the essay and like I100, you basically summarize my entire thesis in a single text message. Awesome.

Awesome. So tell, I think we need round two of empanadas. Let's get some some dip in there.

Yeah. What do we got? What is this? A jelly goodness Shout out our not sponsored sponsor, Gonzale and Castor.

Good catch.

Good night banana.

Yeah, it's old.

We actually just came from lunch but always enough room for more empanadas.

Round two. So Tyler, I want to dive into storytelling. You're one of the most impressive founders I know and I really appreciate how transparent you are about building your company. I feel like storytelling is often seen as an art, but there's also some science to it. What are some frameworks or some structure you use and what's the science behind your storytelling?

Yeah, I'd say there's probably storytelling on a few different levels. There is the internal storytelling that I either tell myself or the employees, which is one, you have to have some level of cognitive dissonance to be a founder and to be able to convince people that have, well, high paying jobs at big tech companies to leave their high paying secure job to join your four person startup. So a lot of storytelling comes out in the recruiting aspect of how do we tell the narrative that whatever we are selling, whether it's more opportunity, more ownership potential, upside, owning a piece of a multi billion dollar business, like you have to really nail that story to get the people that you want to attract into the company. And so, you know, we have our small team of founders, me and my two co founders. Beyond that, we had to convince people who had the most secure job at a well established company, who has a wife and kids to leave their secure job and for what. And so you have to get really good and really tight on what are you selling. For us it's always been yes, you could work at this super secure job, but you're kind of punching in, punching out on the Clock. You are one of hundreds or thousands of employees doing a similar type role. And your end user is so far away from what you're actually doing. So your input is felt so far downstream from what your end users are experiencing. And what we have sold is one full autonomy and ownership. So you come in, you want to build this, you want to make a case that this is what we should be doing. We're a small, scrappy team. If you want to take the initiative to say, this is where I want to spend my time this week and you can make a good case for it, I'm all in and investing in our employees and what they want to do. There is the potential experience of yes, you could be one of 10,000 or it could be one of four people or one of six people. And like your impact on the business and our users is so much higher. So if you want to make an impact, have ownership, have all autonomy. That's like the type of people that we're looking to attract. And the people who are willing to make that jump and that leap are kind of exactly like the product market fit or employee market fit that you're kind of looking for as a startup founder. And then there is the potential upside, right? So every employee in our company has equity in the company. They're a business owner. And so to join a company that is small, and we're still pretty small at 75 people, and we truly believe that we have a multi billion dollar opportunity, how many times in your career can you join in the first hundred employees, have equity and ownership, and then scale a business to be a multibillion dollar business? So it's some level of that. And then I obviously tweak that storytelling and the recruiting depending on what their role is. So for the ad network, you're building something that is hopefully going to compete with a Facebook or Google type ad network. If you're doing engineering, you're building the cutting edge tools in our industry that other competitors don't offer. And then there's a constant storytelling and narrative of one. It's working. We have like full transparency. We have like very tight feedback loops with Twitter, LinkedIn, anyone who shouts out beehive, like just the other day, I think the founder of Vercel, which is like a multibillion dollar web hosting company, praised one of the most recent features that we launched. And the engineer who led that feature was like, dude, that's so awesome. I literally just spent five weeks building this. And then he got praised by the CEO of this multibillion Dollar business. And so that level of ownership and impact, I think, is really rare. And that's something that we really try to enforce at the company.

I love that. And I'd love if you could walk me through how your storytelling has evolved from the early inception days of Beehive, when you're banking off of your Morning Brew experience to Beehive story now.

Yeah. Going even back to our seed round, when we were raising money, we had no product, no revenue, no users. And so at that point, the only thing you have as a founder trying to raise money is storytelling. And we lean very heavily in the early days on the it's what have you done? And like, why are you the right people to build this business? And for us, it was what you just alluded to, which is the Morning Brew experience. It's past and previous accomplishments. And like, are you a credible person who can build this company to be successful? And we lean very heavily on Morning Brew. So our landing pages actually still might have Morning Brew on there, but it's really we. And we being me and my two co founders were the engineers who built a lot of the internal tech and infrastructure at Morning Brew. And now we are basically building similar tech to facilitate anyone who wants to grow an audience, who wants to monetize their audience, who wants to have a successful newsletter. And that's a very compelling both, like, accreditation of what we have done previously and trustworthiness with a big brand name like Morning Brew. And we lean very heavily onto that as we have matured. We now have 25, 30,000 active newsletters. We have people like Arnold Schwarzenegger all the way to very large media publications, both locally and nationally. And so there's more of an accreditation of not only are you taking my word for it, but we have people that are having tremendous success on the platform. They're growing, they're monetizing their brand names that you recognize. But that took several, several years. Right. We went from basically faking it to you making it off of our history and like our past accomplishments to we now have a very compelling platform and we do whatever we can to showcase that.

I love that. And a lot of my founder friends, they focus a lot on the storytelling behind their brand. But I think you really excel at your personal branding as well. Can you share any stories of opportunities that have come from also leveraging your personal brand?

Yeah, and it's not super intentional. If anything, I think I'm overly aware of and try to be overly conscious of, like, I don't want to be the Frontman. I don't want it to be about me. I really just want the business to succeed. Of course.

Cheers.

So like I've always like, not shied away from the spotlight, but like I don't want anything to really be about me at the end of the day. But I've also learned in being in the weeds on Twitter and LinkedIn just how people resonate better with people more than brands. And I think that's like a pretty well studied and established thing. There's plenty of case studies of I think I saw Airbnb launches a new feature from their house account, gets mediocre engagement, but when one of their founders and CEO post it, it gets 10x the engagement. Right. Because people resonate with the person sharing news more than like a company in house account. And so if you are a believer in that, I do think there's value and also like accountability and ownership. So part of what I've leaned into in the personal branding is sharing the stories, the struggles, the ups, the downs and everything which coming from a house account, one just doesn't feel natural and it also doesn't feel personal or authentic. And so I've shared everything from unfortunately it's been more good than bad, but shared things from revenue milestones, amazing users, amazing hires that we've had, the secrets and strategies and frameworks that we use as a business. And then I've also shared things that have gone wrong. We've made mistakes, we've had high churn at points. We are my co founder passed away. Like there's a lot that goes in and building a company that are very highs and very low and the more that you can get people to buy into your story and your Persona, what you're doing, I think it opens the door to so many different opportunities and.

Just keeps it real. When you are able to share the negative parts of a founder's life and the roller coaster that comes with it.

I think there's also like there's a strategic angle as well where yes, I think there's a market of people who really care about email newsletters and those are our target users and let's call that X percent of the market. But there's also a whole nother part of the market that might not be overlapping of people who are just curious about business and startups and company culture and frameworks. And I could just only talk about newsletters. I could be the go to newsletter person and I would attract that first market. I think actually the bigger market is anyone who's interested in how to build, scale a company or even be like an employee that contributes really well to a growing company or a startup. And so a lot of my content and like my personal branding side has been more towards what are we doing, what are the frameworks, what are the strategies for hiring, recruiting and retaining talent or just building a successful business? And so the hope is there, like, maybe you don't have a newsletter, maybe you don't care about newsletters, but you're following my content for how we are building the business and that's interesting and valuable to you. And then when your friend, when you're out at dinner is talking about like, hey, they're moving off of a competitor, they're moving off mailchimp to start a newsletter somewhere else. Like, you already have like the warm lead of like, oh, I follow this guy Tyler, I follow him for his business stuff. But he has this company, Beehive, that does email newsletters really well. Seems like they're super thoughtful about things. It's kind of just building a relationship. At the end of the day, everyone is a person and everyone has emotions and feelings and rational. And if you can say that maybe this company doesn't have everything I want today, but I know the founder, I follow his work. He's trying really hard. They're listening to users, they're improving the product. There's definitely an emotional decision that you can kind of sway by being able to be vulnerable and share your experiences.

I love that I can speak on my own behalf of using your latest blog post about eos. And we implemented at Neo work too, and we made a couple adjustments based on how we saw from the inside view of how Beehive runs their EOS maps.

That's the whole point, right? Yeah. Honestly, I'd say 80% of it is. I genuinely like, I love startups. I've read TechCrunch like every day of college. I am so interested by tech and startups and I think the world is a better place when we have more people taking risks and building things that they believe in and think that should exist in the world. But there's also definitely a 10 to 20% part of that where in getting people that are interested in that that I can help educate and just share whatever insights that I've experienced that we can get them into our funnel somewhere to eventually become a Beehive user or at least a follower of the brand.

So, Tyler, going back to your personal brand storytelling, I really appreciate how transparent you are, but how do you balance that transparency with also some strategic Confidential information like raising another pound of rounding, another round of funding.

Yeah. So I'd say that it's not a one size fits all Right. So some businesses have trade secrets or things that they don't want to share. Maybe it's an incredibly competitive market market. Maybe there's a lot of strategic reasons why you don't want to share certain materials or milestones or whatever it may be for us. I truly don't believe anything we are doing is totally revolutionary. Where we have won, it's execution. So I think we have a very clear vision of what we want to do. We have incredibly smart and talented and driven people on our team and we run the company very well from my opinion and we can execute and out execute most of the competition. So I don't think people are blind to the fact that there's a big market and that there's a lot of players that are making money. I think I'll talk to the flip side, why we have been able to share and I've shared everything from key hires to decisions we've made to revenue milestones. 100k MRR, 500k MRR, a million dollars a month in revenue. What that has done is one, it's attracted this audience of people who are interested in like a behind the scenes, like oh, I've always seen that company but I don't know how they're operating, what their revenue is. I think if you're interested in business, if you just told me about any random business, one of my first few questions, how big are they? How much revenue are they making, how are they scaling? I think people are interested in business, want to know more about businesses and for whatever reason it's a very behind closed door thing where most people don't share it. So I think there's an immediate differentiation in being able to say I'm so confident in our vision and our team and our execution that I can share these metrics and numbers and everything else totally open. The flip side of that is every time I would tweet out or share that, hey, we hit 500,000 mrr. One that attracts a lot of users because we are hitting at least even social networks and how they work. It catches momentum and reaches a bunch of different networks of people who are like, hey, I think I've seen them before but they're too new, they're not established. But now that I know they're making a million dollars a month, I know they're not going to go out of business or I don't think they're going to go out of business, they clearly have traction. There's a lot of social proof in those different milestones. So one, it attracts users over two, I think it attracts a lot of potential employees. So people who are unhappy at their current job but are really talented at engineering or design or whatever, really, they might be at a competitor. But seeing that we're doing really well and have this momentum, you know, if we posted 900k MRR last month and now we're at a million, like, clear upward trajectory, I think it attracts a lot of really talented and ambitious people. So it's good for users, it's good for employee recruiting and retention and then obviously for investors as well. So I've shared this like a few times, but our series A took a week to raise 12 and a half million last year. And then this year our series B where we raised 33 million took two weeks. And a lot of that is because there's no smoke or mirrors. Like they don't have to do tons of diligence. I'm already actively sharing everything in public, and every time I share a milestone, my inbox and DMs fill with interest from investors and other people. And so if you're trying to be venture backed or even if you're bootstrapped and just want the legitimacy of more users and more potential hires, I found it incredibly advantageous to share different milestones.

I'm such a big believer in LinkedIn as a recruitment tool of showing that, hey, equity in this company is actually meaningful. It's going somewhere and part of the storytelling.

Right. Like at the end, like when we hit these milestones, I'm always so overly conscious of being like, hey, look at me, like we're now we're doing a million dollars a month instead, my brain immediately goes to the flip side of that, which is look at that. We're at doing a million dollars a month, which means we could be valued at this. And because you're all business and stakeholders in this company, that means, you know, maybe if we can keep working harder and continuing to execute, there could be a new house for you at the other end. Or like, how does it benefit our employees and keep them motivated is kind of, I think, like the name of the game really as a founder and a leader of a company.

Totally. And with your personal branding over the past 12 months, have you seen any changes with social media and its algorithms and how your audience has?

Yeah, it's a great question. I'd say I'm like scrapping by On Twitter, like, I started obviously from like nothing. Back when I was at Morning Brew, I had two or three thousand followers. I'm at at the time of this recording, maybe 23,000. But it's like I tweet like two or three times a day, put out what I think is like decently good content, and it's like maybe growing 100, 150 followers per week. On the flip side, which I think is a trend, I'm seeing a lot more of people talking about their success on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is crushing it. Like every time I post on LinkedIn, it's hundreds of likes, hundreds of reactions, a lot of lead gen, a lot of DMs. So I think it was cool and fun. Funny to shit on LinkedIn earlier for like the past like 10 years, like LinkedIn was the place where you put very cringy content. But I actually think that's what I do slightly differently is I feel like I'm fairly outspoken. I feel like I'm very transparent and I feel like I'm not very buttoned up to say like the proper thing. I just speak kind of like, kind of like tell it how it is in almost every setting, which I think does a few things. One, like how I am at our lunch and dinners or at the bar or whatever. It's exactly how I am with my employees and my co founders and everyone else, which actually welcomes everyone else to be themselves. And I think that's so important and interesting and different. I've been at companies, not Morning Brew, so I worked at Google too. A lot of people have two different Personas. They have their real Persona, they're friendly out and about with friends, and then they have work Persona which is. Can't say that, can't do that. Can't really express emotion how I want because it's a work setting and that's not acceptable. So I think part of being outspoken and really being myself 100% of the time invites everyone else to share funny stories, feel comfortable doing different things, which brings one people feeling more comfortable, more happy. We have a great work culture and I think a lot of it comes from that. But the other thing is I am that exact way on LinkedIn. And so I'll say things exactly how I think about them on LinkedIn, which is a little bit different than the super polished, buttoned up business professional speak. And I think it jumps out. And when you mix that with radical transparency into numbers, metrics, users churn storytelling. On LinkedIn, I've seen like a lot of success on LinkedIn recently.

I love that of just the dynamics of keeping it the same with employees as you would with friends.

Yeah, we went, we had our off site in Montreal three weeks ago and we worked really hard. We had like a lot of great breakthroughs, but we also went to two different clubs, got 1942 bottles, like had an amazing time. Amazing for like culture building and just like drinking. I mean, we're totally remote company. Right. So I think there's a fun aspect to just hang out with your co workers that you've been in slack and like virtual meets with for the entire year to get in person, sit down next to each other, work together and then party. We went to a polo and pan concert. Like we just had a genuine fun. And the takeaway from the weekend was that wasn't just work fun, that was genuinely just fun. That was like an amazing weekend. But like, that's what I think helps attract the right people. Like work hard, play arts, like super cringy and overplayed. But there is something to just being unique and everyone just being themselves and us saying like, yes, we are extremely motivated to build this company and to contribute and make an impact. But at the end of the day, we're all just people and we like hanging out, we like having fun and we like making a difference. And I think it really shows.

I love that. Yeah, I saw some wild photos on LinkedIn of Jess getting crazy. Shout out to Jess on his team.

Yes.

Yeah, I just came back two weeks ago from off site in San Andres, Colombia with my team. And that was one of the biggest sticking points is like, let's keep New York's culture weird, fun. Let's not get corporate. Even as we get bigger. I think that's so many companies, when they scale, they start to lose that culture and values that made them special early on. So I love it.

It's like my number one fear in building the business is losing kind of like the it that we have now, which is very loose, very fun. We do all hands on Monday and Friday and all 75 people speak, which is chaos. When I say that people like don't believe that we can do it. We do it in an hour somehow. But we have like different prompts. So the first prompt is like very work focused. It is, what is your top priority this week or on Friday, like, what was your top accomplishment of the week? And then the second prompt is total wild guard, favorite musician, favorite movie highlight from the past weekend. So it gives you kind of a glimpse into other people's lives and also builds like this connective tissue of if one of the prompts was, what's like a concert that you want to go to this? Or what's your favorite upcoming plan for the summer? And I was like, I'm seeing Dead and Company at the Sphere in Las Vegas with my family. And like four people reached out like, dude, I love Dead and Company. That's awesome. And so then now we're just like back channeling, having conversations totally outside of work, but finding like connective tissue of how we relate. And so I'm very intentional in trying to build those types of experiences. But yeah, the lack of process. Not that we don't have process, but the lack of over process, the lack of bureaucracy, the freedom and autonomy which comes with remote work and just trusting people. Because I can't sit behind everyone's shoulder and see if they're working and typing and doing their best. They could be watching a movie. But the type of people that we've attracted are very driven for, like our mission and are very goal oriented. And so there's a lot of trust built into everything that we do. And at the end, like, as you listen to this conversation, you can kind of hear like a lot of the same themes emerging, like, globally distributed, tons of trust put into everyone. Everyone is themselves, everyone is happy, everyone is motivated and driven. And I think the combination of all of those things is like one, what makes up culture, but where a lot of companies grow to a certain point, whether it's 100 employees, employees or series B or series C, and they feel like, oh, just because every company larger than us does it this way, we have to now change what has got us here to be like an official company that has performance reviews and processes and this and whatever. And I try to fight and push back on that as much as possible.

Totally. Tyler, I'm way ahead of you. What's going on over there?

I'm going to blame it on me eating more for lunch. But yes, you are ahead of me. I'm also doing a lot of the talking here.

That's true, that's true, that's true. So, Tyler, going back to storytelling, can you share a time where you used an unconventional method or style and what were the results that. That leveraged?

Yeah. By unconventional style, do you mean in terms of medium? In terms of story? In terms of. Yeah, hit me with what you're thinking.

Yeah. In terms of the structure of the story itself, something that you've not seen other brands or people do as individuals.

It'S A great question. Don't have an amazing answer. To be honest, I feel like I'd say 95% of the content that I create is not super planned thought out, like well orchestrated. Of like, I don't start with a KPI. I'm like, oh, we need to do this. So I need to figure out how to get more of X, which means I need to create more of Y and plan it out. A lot of it is one again, going into storytelling and everything else. I love psychology. Everything from AP Psych in high school to reading a bunch of books, thinking fast and slow. I think again, I've said eight times, but I feel like people overlook that at the end of the day, the people you're interacting with, whether it's hiring or the decision makers at a company to choose you as a vendor, are literally just people that have their own biases. They have their own emotions, feelings, thoughts. The same reason why people invite you to go to the super bowl as like a potential vendor so you think more highly of them. People think that they're above these biases, but at the end of the day, that's just what it is to be human. And so I'm always constantly looking for how do we portray either our narrative or our business in the best light possible. I'd also say another thing, not totally unique that we do, but are very intentional about would be highlighting our user success. I think that is the greatest case study in marketing you can do in the first place. There's a lot of once a week we'll launch two or three new features. We'll pump it out and we'll be like, hey, here's what we launched this week. Look at us, we're so cool. We launched these new features for you. That's one way to go about it. And we do that. But what I think is cooler is saying when a user is like, hey, I just used Beehive's new feature. And for example, we launched this thing where for premium subscriptions, we can charge your audience directly. You can say, I am offering a Premium subscription for $10 a month, $100 a year. We launched a feature where you can have multiple tiers. So you can have like a gold tier for $50 a month and a silver tier for $30 a month. We launched that and a week later, users said, this is the thing that's been missing in my business. I've made $10,000 in the past week from this feature. And then we build like a whole case study around that. So I think again, it's storytelling, but it does get redundant in me being the one leading the storytelling and the business being, like the star of every story. I try to find ways where we can highlight and emphasize the success of our users and show them, like, yes, we played a small part in their success and that's part of what we're highlighting. But again, at the end of the day, I want everyone that I come in contact with to win. I want them to have success if they trust me to build their company or business on Beehive. I want to make sure that when they hit those successful milestones, metrics, whatever, we are their number one cheerleader and can promote their work. And so that's a big part of the storytelling as well.

Awesome. Yeah. I'm just curious, what's the story behind the name Beehive, the branding? Are you a fan of honey or what's going on there?

One of my least favorite questions, because there was so little thought into it. I am potentially very ocd and I just need a foundation before building. So I had the idea with my co founders of we can build a platform that does this, and then it's like, okay, what do we do next? Do we start building? Do we, like, what colors do we choose? What is, like, the foundation? For me, like, as a dreamer or someone who has, like, inspiration and goals and whatever, I need to, like, envision it. And for me, envisioning means, like, what does this look like being successful? And part of that boils down to, like, what is the name and what is, like, this thing going to look like one year, three year, five years, years from now? And there was very little thought put into it. It was what is like a. It really just comes from, like, a hive of followers. So someone who has a hive of people following them, their audience, whatever. So we were playing with, like, the hive word, and then, like, beehive came up. I was like, that sounds fine. I can see that. I can clearly see, like a logo around that. There's a name there. Beehive, spelled correctly, was taken as a URL, as most good URLs are. So I just played with classic startup spelling and doubled some letters, moved some things around. We found one that was available for $10. And I also truly believe, and I think we're a case study of this name doesn't really matter. I think if your product, everyone who's OCD on SEO optimization and word of mouth and podcast reads and everything else would say, name is so important, you need whatever. And granted, if there was a choice between a 10 out of 10amazing name and a 2 out of 10 name, I'll choose a 10 out of 10 name and not try to prove my point. But I actually think if you're solving a great problem and your product platform service is considerably better and works and serves a purpose and provides value, that name is an afterthought. We could have named it Dog Shit and I think that could have hit right.

Logo might be interesting, but Logo could.

Be definitely interesting, but it could have been empanadas, I don't know. But yeah. So there's not too much thought behind the name. It was like, this is step one of building this business. We need a name. I put an hour of thought into it, found a domain, bought it, got the colors, everything else.

And then going back to your personal branding, how much do you look into the data of the performance and do you make decisions based off of that?

Honestly, not totally data driven because.

It'S.

Funny how I've backed into a lot of people asking me about the personal brand, the storytelling, the transparency. This is definitely not a choreographed strategy. From day one of I'm going to be a content creator who is going to promote everything that we're doing, share everything and be this figurehead of startup, entrepreneurship, transparency and everything else, I've kind of backed into that. And so by saying that, and I'm not a pure play content creator, I just shoot from the hip. I wake up, someone tweets like, hey, didn't know you could do this on Beehive. It's awesome. And that makes me think like there's a chain reaction of that's awesome. I didn't know you could do that on Beehive. To me, my brain jumps to what other platforms don't offer that. And like how do we find a wedge competitively to say we can do this and these platforms can't? Which to me is a way to get in front of new potential users. So maybe it's just like how my brain is wired. It's like I'm just constantly trying to look for like alpha or an edge to either dig at our competitors or differentiate ourselves further to put ourselves as like the superior option in our industry. But for the data side of things, sometimes I'll think a tweet is funny. It doesn't get great engagement and I'll learn from that and move on. But I don't look at how many engagements, what's the highest click through rate or anything else. Kind of like a volume play, whatever comes top of mind Yep.

I've come across that a couple times where I thought that this joke would really play well.

We all have.

Yep. Yep. Awesome. Tyler, last question for you, man. What's one strongly held belief that you have these days that 99% of people would disagree with?

That's a great question. This is the one that you actually should have prepped me with in advance because whenever I get a question like this, I'm like, fuck, if I only had a little bit more time to really think about this. We've already kind of talked on remote work, and I actually don't think that's as contrarian as it used to be. I'm like, such a believer that that's a core competitive advantage. Other things that I believe. My most controversial tweet that I've ever sent, that I got 50% love, 50% hate. So, you know, it's like right on the button, was that being a single founder is a competitive advantage. And then obviously that brought out everyone who has, like, in a happy marriage or relationship being like, oh, it's so supportive to have someone who, like, believes in your vision and is there for you and can support you, which I don't doubt. But, like, for me, it was like a very fundamental. Like, as a founder, you need more time and you need more focus. And it stemmed from someone who kept trying to ask and set up calls with me. They're like, hey, need to pick your brain on something? Can you help me out in schedule time? I offer five different times and each time we would reschedule week after week because his wife had to do this and then he had to drop his kid off and then he had to go to dinner and one of the nights was date night and there was five excuses in a row. And I was like, I have never had any of those excuses because I'm just single and focused. And again, I'm actually not single at this point. Moment of the recording. But the point remains. I think what you need in a super competitive industry and building a company is so hard is focus and drive and a lack of excuses. And the fundamental argument that I was getting out in that very controversial tweet was by being single and focused, you have no distractions, unless you want distractions. But I don't know. That was the most controversial piece of content I've ever put out. I still stand by it.

Hopefully your girlfriend's not watching this, of course. And so your current self, Reflecting back the 12 month ago version of Tyler, you'd still agree with that, that being single is advantageous.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's really just an argument for less distractions and more time and more focus. And so when I was like a big thing that I've one of my competitive advantages, I guess, or things that I just enjoy doing, it's like a late Friday night. So the week is so hectic when people are paying me for sales things or support things or engineering issues. Being on the west coast, we're three hours behind where most people are on the East Coast. So around like 2:00 clock on a Friday, like it goes like, quiet. There's definitely people still working, but there's less both externally and internally. And so like the 2pm Pacific time on a Friday to like 2am that night is just 12 hours of no distractions, very few emails, very few slacks. And that's where I get a lot of my work done. And that's where as again, single Tyler, a year ago, didn't need to worry about dates or anything else in my life except how do I get done what I need to get done. And I know that's not always accepted of, like, hey, my partner is so supportive and it's there for me when I need it. I'm sure that's true, but at the end of the day, I'm a big believer in focus and just getting things done.

Awesome.

Great talk.

So where can people find you online?

Yeah. So danktweets on Twitter, my name on LinkedIn, and then mail.bigdeskenergy.com for the newsletter. Awesome.

Thanks so much, Ben. Really appreciate having you on board.

You can take one of these. I'll do one last. Cheers.

Ready? Arribajo. Acentrontro.

Cheers. Salud. Cheers.