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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

📢 New Media, Legacy Media & How To Do Founder PR. An interview with Emilie Gerber, Founder & Principal at Six Eastern.
🎸 Brand Breakdown: Does Liquid Death’s Brand Convert? It's rock and roll water, but it doesn't it work for everyone, and that's ok.
🧠 Helping Discover Reliable Information Online, With AI. An interview with Luke Kim, Founder & CEO at Liner.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

There is something that has been on my mind a lot lately, and that is: The Red Paperclip Story. In case you haven’t heard of it, the story goes that this crazy Canadian guy swapped a simple red paperclip for a house. It went red paperclip for a fish-shaped pen, the fish-shaped pen for a hand-sculpted doorknob, and so on. I have been obsessed with the idea since the day I heard it, but not for the reason you’d imagine.

My goal with my businesses is to buy my mum a lovely house to live in. My mum is 63 now, and after she and my dad separated, she was not left with a lot, so she needs to work her butt off to make ends meet. I foresee the ability to sell Athyna someday and buy / pay off both my parents’ houses, but I am still enjoying building the company with my team, so I don’t know when that day will come. So, I ask you, reader: should I attempt to run the same playbook of the red paperclip strategy for my dear old mumsies?

I may or may not have the red paperclip ready by the way. Anyway, enough on paperclips, let’s dive into today’s awesome piece breaking dowm the success of one of my favourite tools in the world, beehiiv. Enjoy!

GUEST POST 💄

beehiiv’s 5-Year Sprint to $20M ARR

The creator economy is booming. And in no small part thanks to tools that allow creators around to do just what they do best: create. beehiiv is one of those tools. And if you are a true newsletter savant, you know that it is not one of the tools in a creator’s toolkit, but the tool in the creator's toolkit. Don’t take it from me, though; take it from the market.

beehiiv, led by mad scientist Tyler Denk, has absolutely raced to $20 million dollary-doos or ARR in less than half a decade. And with the pace at which they are moving, they’ll be at $100M+ in no time. The best thing with beehiiv is that they are not only winning market share, but growing the entire market as they do so. And as the world gets noisier, and digital channels like Meta and Google get more competitive, the idea for brands to be able to cut through and get in front of an owned creator audience becomes increasingly more appealing.

I’m sure the question on your lips is the same as mine: How did they do it? Well, today, luckily for us, we will have this broken down by Tony Varghase, Senior Marketing Manager at beehiiv. Tony will walk us through the key strategies, and even a tactic or two behind how a cheeky upstart went from zero to industry leader in the blink of a tiny little honeybee’s eye. Let’s dive in!

A tour into the hiiv

Hey there team, Tony here! I’m excited to run you through this. When we launched beehiiv in 2021, most people’s first question was, why? There were huge players in the space, years ahead of us, with literally billions more in the bank. But that’s the exact reason we knew we could win. The legacy email tools were clunky, and new updates were few and far between, social platforms were holding creators hostage to algorithms, and every time-saving ‘solution’ seemed to cause more problems than it fixed. We believed creators deserved better. Five years and $20M ARR later, we’ve proven that hunch right. Here’s how we got there.

Removing barriers: Freemium + PLG Stack

We knew if you made it easy for people to start, well, more people would start. Our generous free plan lets creators set up shop without a credit card or a multi-step sales call. You could literally land on beehiiv and have your first email out in minutes. But we didn’t stop there. We opened the gates to features that other platforms charge for—automations, analytics, advanced segmentation—so creators got real value before spending a cent.

The result? We shortened the ‘time-to-send’ window and let the product speak for itself. Product-led growth wasn’t just a strategy; it was survival.

Building growth loops into the product

Another thing we did was, instead of pouring money into ads, we made our users the growth engine. This user-first flywheel became the heartbeat of beehiiv.

This cycle has brought in millions of high-quality subscribers across the ecosystem with very little paid acquisition from us. By focusing on core growth features that actually deliver results, we created a product that didn’t need a hard sell. It worked so well that users couldn’t help but share their success all over their socials, creating an incredible amount of UGC (user-generated content) for us, and in doing so, they became our best advocates.

Using content as a growth engine

We have leaned into a build-in-public mindset from day one. Our founders, especially our CEO, Tyler, shared raw, tactical growth lessons on X, LinkedIn, his newsletter and as many podcasts as humanly possible. We also built out SEO-optimized comparison pages (beehiiv vs Substack, beehiiv vs Mailchimp, etc) that brought thousands of curious creators into our orbit.

Tyler’s personal newsletter, Big Desk Energy, gave founders (and thousands of other startup employees) a front-row seat to how we think about growth, our product, and the industry as a whole. People don’t want neutered, boring marketing speak; they want to see the failures, the triumphs, and the vision.

“I’ve more or less published our entire operating system as a company: focus days, traction, dogfooding, the weekly success list, board meetings, and our product velocity playbook,” Tyler said. “When I first launched the newsletter, beehiiv had less than 40 employees and $500K MRR. Today, the company has scaled to nearly 100 global employees, and we’re currently generating over $2M of revenue per month. My early subscribers have been through it all, each step of the way.”

beehiiv’s core users are people and companies who want to own the process of building and growing. So when we say we are ‘Built by builders, for builders,’ we want it to ring true and feel relatable. This relationship has positioned us as a company that doesn’t just build tools for creators, but one that understands the journey and obstacles intimately.

Designing a category around creators

Most email platforms were built for big brands or corporate comms. We wanted creators to feel like this was theirs. Our pitch was simple: own your audience, own your growth, own your future. We weren’t just another ESP; we were building the operating system for modern media businesses. We think of the early lifecycle of a newsletter in particular, in four stages.

We help early-stage creators to the more established brands move through these stages with ease. This creator-first, anti-algorithm stance resonated in a social media-saturated world where every other platform throttles reach. Creators wanted a home base they controlled.

Relentless product velocity

From day one, we’ve promised creators that if we didn’t have a feature today, we’d have it tomorrow—and we meant it. Every month, we launched new tools that made growing a newsletter easier, faster, and more powerful. We rolled out a website builder designed specifically for newsletters, not blogs. We rebuilt our recommendation engine to surface smarter, more relevant cross-promotions. We released sleeker templates shaped directly by user feedback. And we expanded our ad network to connect publishers with brands like Roku, Contra, and Axios.

While legacy tools were stagnating, we were sprinting. Often shipping overnight based on real conversations happening with users in our Slack, on X, or directly in support tickets. That pace kept our customers excited and our competitors scrambling to keep up.

It seems simple to say, ‘we listen to our community,’ but too often that just means companies talk at their users. We wanted to do the opposite. beehiiv creators are building real relationships with their audiences every day, and we’ve always aimed to match that same energy in how we build with, and for, them.

Community and referrals

We built more than software, we built a hiiv. Our Slack community became the town square for growth tactics, monetization ideas, and peer support. Similarly, our Partner Program turned our best customers into evangelists, rewarding them for spreading the word.

We’ve also recently rolled out our new Top 4 Recommendations feature. This lets creators connect with and lift up other beehiiv newsletters—creating cross-promotion loops that grew entire networks overnight. You could call it referral marketing, but we like to think of it as collaboration at scale.

Growth ops and lifecycle optimization

Data guided our moves, but intuition made the calls. We built a robust analytics system to track every step of the funnel, then used that insight to automate timely nudges that moved users forward.

The creator flywheel

Winning big creators early was rocket fuel. When Shaan Puri moved his audience to beehiiv, thousands followed. Each high-profile win wasn’t just a testimonial. It was proof that serious creators trusted us to handle serious growth.

ubled down on this by running virtual events, publishing case studies, and amplifying success stories. It was a growth strategy, but it also felt incredibly natural: creators bring in new creators, with each one raising the bar for what’s possible on beehiiv. Because of this, household name creators like Russell Westbrook, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and YouTube stars Colin & Samir now call beehiiv home. And as we grow, we expect more and more winning creators to join us.

The beehiiv Playbook

• Turn your product into a growth channel: Features like Boosts and the Ad Network weren’t just helpful—they created natural growth loops that fed back into the business.

• Ship fast and loud: We launched early and often, then shared every update publicly. Velocity builds trust… and momentum.

• Use content as your distribution: From SEO blogs to founder-led social posts, content didn’t just support growth—it was growth.

• Build with, not for, your community: Slack chats, feedback loops, real conversations. Our roadmap literally came from our users.

Future

If there’s one lesson from growing beehiiv to $20M ARR in under five years, it’s this: data gives you direction, but the best moves often come from gut instinct, fast iteration, and listening more than your competitors.

We’re not done (obviously). Growth is a moving target, and the next five years will demand new strategies, new ideas, and new bets. But the core philosophy remains the same: empower creators, move fast, and keep improving.

Extra reading

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - January, 2024

• Tyler Denk & beehiiv Are Growing Really, Really Fast - March, 2024

• The Acquisition Mechanics: beehiiv + Swapstack - January, 2025

• How beehiiv Raised $50M (Fast) - April, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Tyler on LinkedIn and Twitter and also checkout beehiiv on their website to learn more.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Paddle—a merchant of record, managing payments, tax and compliance needs—we use their ProfitWell tool.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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