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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

My partner won a dog photoshoot contest a few weeks ago. It was a $2,000 voucher from an agency that shoots your images for free, then only gives them to you in a framed package for $5-20k. I think the voucher was actually a sneaky lead magnet trick, to be fair. But we did manage to sneak this epic photo of the two of us with our little man, Ziggy.

Nothing more to add here, really. Just sharing a little snippet of my life with you all. I love this photo. Anywho, today’s piece is a great one, with beehiiv, a company that I really love. I hope you enjoy reading it!

ZERO TO ONE 🌱

When David Ate Goliath: beehiiv’s Zero To One

The word ‘velocity’ /vɪˈlɒsɪti/ originates from the Latin noun vēlōcitās, which means swiftness or speed, itself derived from the Latin adjective vēlōx, meaning fast or rapid. Although I have enough Italian heritage to claim I am a son of Ancient Rome, I don’t speak Latin and couldn’t point out the Tiber River on a map. Being a tech nerd, when I think of velocity, I think of product velocity. And when I think of this particular flavor of startup speed, I think of one company: beehiiv.

Along with a dash of customer obsession and a sprinkle of can-do attitude, product velocity has allowed beehiiv to enter a wholly owned market, disrupt it, and take a whole whack of market share along the way. As a user of the product, it’s been a total joy to watch.

While they have crushed it in their short existence, it’s not been easy for beehiiv. They’ve battled incumbents, waged war on their upstart competition, and dealt with shocking loss and heartache along the way.

Today, I’m here to tell their story. In researching this piece, I sat down with beehiiv’s CEO, Tyler Denk, along with Chief Customer Officer Preeya Goenka, and senior product OG Shreya Srikanth. What I unearthed was very cool, so let’s jump right into it!

The Morning Brew cheat code

Some startup teams are Harvard grads, megamind types, that are just itching to find the right problem. The types that have so much intellectual horsepower they could power the streetlights of a small city. Strong teams in search of a worthy problem can win, but it’s often a better play to solve a pain you yourself personally feel. This is the story of beehiiv’s founding.

Tyler, along with co-founders Benjamin Hargett and Jake Hurd, had worked inside the successful business news for college grads-cum grown-up people newsletter, Morning Brew. You might know it now as a multimedia network of newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels, but it started as a humble email rag. A humble rag that would grow to 4M subscribers and subsequently be acquired by Business Insider (owned by Axel Springer) for a cool $75 millioneys.

As you can imagine, this experience paved the way for beehiiv, because they had felt (and built) things from the inside at The Brew: "We were so deep in the weeds of what we needed to build, as we'd already built this all internally at Morning Brew, as a case study, and it worked extremely well."

Tyler explained to me that he and his co-founders sat right at the intersection of content and sales. To their left, among the creative-content hippies, they saw firsthand what it took to be a world-class publisher. To their right, they sat close enough to the uber-capitalist sales team that they also knew the language they spoke, and really understood what it took to close high-value advertisers.

Some of this existed on other platforms; the rest, Tyler and the team coded up manually themselves. They quite literally built beehiiv before building beehiiv.

And, Tyler told me, the experience was altogether just frustrating: “They were also expensive, and a lot of them had gone through acquisitions and weren't innovating the way hungry startups do when they're chasing market share.” To them, there seemed to be a market screaming for a consolidated, creator-first company to be born.

Ship or die

One of the most fascinating things to me about companies like beehiiv is the general chutzpah it takes to launch in a market dominated by huge incumbents. I can’t imagine going into sales conversations knowing that what we can do is likely only 10% of what the platform they are currently using can do.

_{*Note: Let’s switch to verbatim for a minute as I think it will play better.}

Bill (me): “How did you win over noteworthy publishers in the early days, given how feature-deficient you were compared to the incumbents?”

Tyler: ”The first big customer we had was Litquidity, the meme account. Getting him as a user was actually pretty straightforward, as he'd invested in the company.

Bill: ”And what came after that?”

Tyler: ”Well, we raised about 25 angels, and I'd say 20 of them moved their newsletters over within a month of us launching. Litquidity was definitely the biggest one; he had 100,000 subscribers on MailerLite. We couldn't do more than 10% of what MailerLite does at that point. He just totally trusted us, and we figured it out. And then it's a game of snowballing success stories. Now that we had Litquidity on the platform, we could turn that into a case study for all the other publishers and newsletters who looked up to him. The narrative became: this is the founding team behind Morning Brew's internal tech. We scaled that to four million readers. We already have Litquidity with 100,000 subscribers, and its open rates had improved since moving to us.”

Me again. Tyler told me that although they had the small win with the investor cohort, these times weren’t exactly easy: "I literally had a tenth of our revenue threatening to churn in my inbox every single morning." The only way for Tyler and team to combat this was to move fast: ship or die mode.

Bill (me again): “If you had to put your finger on one thing, what was the lead domino in the zero-to-one stage?”

Tyler: ”Product velocity and product-led growth. That was our MO and what I think we're best known for. But it truly came out of necessity—almost out of insecurity. Users reached out to me every single day, complaining that we weren't up to par with the other platforms. I'd wake up to fifteen angry emails from people asking for things they could easily do on their old platform, threatening to leave if we didn't build it.

That anxiety and urgency pushed us to move quickly and hire more engineers.”

Bill: ”So, I guess you needed to ship and ship fast?”

Tyler: “Yep, our whole product launch strategy came out of three buckets. One is educating existing users; when you launch a new product announcement, you're basically saying, ‘I heard you, we built it, it's live today.’ You're preventing churn from the people who were about to leave. Two is marketing: when you launch new features publicly, you're checking boxes for people who were watching but hadn't switched yet because you were missing XYZ. And three is the combination of both. When you do it every week, you change the narrative from ‘they're missing a lot of features’ to ‘they ship so quickly that even if they only have 70% of what I want today, I'm confident they'll have 100% in a few weeks.’ That was the biggest lever. It let us punch well above our weight.”

Something else that was layered into those early days, and still rings true today, was building in public: Tyler showing that he genuinely cares, that they listen to customer feedback, and that he can be personally DM’d if the proverbial excrement hits the fan.

This final point is actually something I witnessed firsthand. I clearly remember a time when my buddy Tom Alder, who writes Strategy Breakdowns, and I had a problem with our CTR on the beehiiv platform and ended up chatting directly with Tyler on Slack for an hour to solve it on the spot.

How the sausage gets shipped (the velocity machine)

Product velocity, you see, is what makes beehiiv tick. While their early speed can be reverse-engineered from a place of fear and desperation, the company is just very much built to move fast. Let’s rip into a few of their key concepts.

1/ Improved handoff-ectomy

For one, all three founders are technical, which really helped in the early days. What also helped was that seven of the first ten hires were also engineers. What also, also helped was that beehiiv have never really hired much by way of product management and design. “When you're constantly coordinating between a designer finishing mockups, a front-end engineer building it, passing it to back-end, and then QA, there are too many cooks in the kitchen,” Tyler would tell me.

It wasn’t that the team didn’t believe in hiring for these functions; they just wanted them in one role. ‘Engineers with taste’ is the high-level way to think about it. Product engineers is another. This way, one person carries the feature from idea to shipped. Every handoff you remove is a queue, a meeting, and a misunderstanding you never have to pay for. Co-founder Ben is, in Tyler's words, the most creative and design-forward engineer he has ever come across, too. Ben doesn't need mockups. He just has taste. So in the early days, they cut the design function entirely, to make way for lightning-fast handoff-ectomy (new word).

_{*Note: This is not to say absolutely everything went smoothly; features were launched and then abandoned; things broke, etcetera, etcetera, but beehiiv have remained very lean on the PM side still to today with 40-50 engineers and only 5-6 people in product and design.}

2/ The 24-hour PRD

While Tyler helped flesh out the hiring philosophy, Shreya filled me in on how nimble their PRD (product requirements document, for you non-product readers) is. In her previous PM roles, Shreya saw feature progress over weeks or months: figure out what to build, write a long document, get fifteen stakeholders to review it, rounds of back-and-forth, then a tech review, then design, then finally engineering. The thinking happened entirely before the building.

At beehiiv, the building starts before the thinking is finished.

The unlock here is psychological, not procedural. Most orgs treat an unfinished vision as a reason to wait. beehiiv treats it as a reason to start, because building the thing is how they finish the thinking. They only need two things locked before they move: the core opportunity and the core functionality. The rest gets solved as it shows up. "Sometimes we'll be launching something the day after tomorrow, and someone comes in with 'it'd be really cool if we did this.' Nobody asks why they're bringing it in so late. Everyone just thinks about how we can make this work in this timeframe.”

3/ The ambitious launch date

And finally, this would all be for naught if it weren’t for Tyler’s ambition around a day and time in the calendar. But first, let’s talk about how they structure their cadences. The shape of a quarter looks like the following: a quarterly roadmap, then three-week sprints, each followed by a one-week cooldown. Three sprints and three cooldowns per quarter. Sprints are where the bulk of feature work happens, usually one project per sprint, with each engineer carrying one or two major features a quarter. Cooldowns are for bugs and quality-of-life fixes.

The deadline philosophy is the interesting bit, and it is genuinely counterintuitive. They set deadlines they fully expect to miss.

An ambitious deadline is not a promise; it is a forcing function. It pulls the work forward even when it slips. A realistic deadline gives you a realistic pace; an ambitious one you are allowed to miss gives you beehiiv's pace.

Something else I found refreshing was that beehiiv protects their deep work time like Ghost protected Jon Snow. They carve Tuesdays and Thursdays out as ‘meeting-free’ days to go heads down, bum up, and get work done. And it’s one of Tyler’s go-tos, as per Shreya: “It's almost like a challenge. That ability to create momentum on a dime is genuinely one of his strengths.”

Do things that don't scale → customer love

In 2013, Paul Graham wrote the most quoted essay in startup history, telling founders to recruit users by hand and do the unscalable stuff early. Think the Airbnb founders going door-to-door manually taking photos that looked good so their listings looked appealing, or Reddit’s Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian keeping the site busy with fake user accounts. beehiiv read Graham’s essay and ignored the part about stopping once you scale.

This mindset also began with CCO Preeya Goenka, who, in the early days, would make sure users were happy and onboarded well by holding their hands all the way through the process: "It wasn't 'here are ten things you have to do.’ It was me personally importing your list. Let me personally help you build your template."

Four years and 55,000 customers later, every PM still onboards real users by hand, on purpose. This type of service, and more importantly, care, isn’t something that just happens on its own. It starts with Tyler, who famously answered support emails at the Hour of the Wolf (let’s call it two in the morning) years into the journey, then through to Preeya, and on to the product team.

This type of devotion to the customer means you end up with loyal users who are passionate enough to shout it from the rooftops. These are the NPS nine and ten folks; those who tell their friends and their entire social audience about their experience. Priceless advocates. I consider myself one of them. In Shreya’s words, "Ten people who love it are worth more than hundreds who just like it." beehiiv have tens of thousands of said people.

_{*Note: For context, Darragh above runs Half Baked, which boasts 130,000 subscribers, and Matt Paulson runs MarketBeat, a $50 million dollar financial publication, housed on beehiiv.}

And it paid massive dividends. "We didn't spend a single dollar on acquisition for the first eighteen to twenty-four months,” Preeya would tell me, “Everything was entirely through word of mouth and social.” This means the money machine definitely goes brrrrrrr, but you also see countless people shitting on the competition. Which leads nicely into the next chapter in our beehiiv story.

Every hero needs a villain

If you were one of those people, such as myself, who devoured the Netflix documentary The Last Dance during COVID, then you know that Michael Jordan has a voracious appetite for an enemy. He hungers for them; feeds on them; it gives him energy. Tyler works in the same way: "Every company benefits from having some kind of enemy or rival... Michael Jordan would just manufacture rivalries out of thin air."

From what I can see, Tyler and the entire beehiiv community at large have three ongoing beefs: 1) Substack, 2) the company formerly known as ConvertKit (Kit), and 3) the incumbency (Mailchimp, MailerLite, et al). Substack is a beef because they don’t share the same creator-first ethos as beehiiv; ConvertKit is more personal; and the incumbents, well, they barely register.

Starting in reverse order, in the earliest days, it was important for beehiiv to counter against the MailChimps of the world, but senior PM Shreya Srikanth said it best, “We were just confused by them. They never seemed to ship anything... I'd always have a FigJam open with screenshots of every flow, and I'd look at it and think, 'this is so bad, we can do this ten times better.'” Rivalry level out of 10 = 3 (afterthoughts).

Next, we have the beehiiv x ConvertKit beef. Or, more specifically, the beef between Tyler and his opposing founder, Nathan Barry. The beef started when beehiiv made a critical mistake that sent their emails into spam for two full weeks. A real down moment for the early-stage startup at the time. “Every day for three weeks, I was fielding threats from users wanting to leave, taking it to social, furious,” Tyler would say.

The beef hit a fever pitch when Nathan and the ConvertKit team began emailing beehiiv users telling them about the mistake, essentially saying they would never do that at ConvertKit because they ‘actually know what they're doing.’

”We were genuinely vulnerable. Not much cash, best users are all experiencing a problem we'd caused. Not a position of strength.” As you can imagine…

What Nathan didn’t account for was who they were going into battle with. If your product is your weapon, then they were effectively bringing a rusted teaspoon to a gun fight. beehiiv have gone on to lap ConvertKit on the brand, product, growth, and overall success front since. Rivalry level out of 10 = 6 (genuine combatants).

The last rivalry, the philosophical one, and likely the most vicious, is that of Substack. Aside from the fact that Substack has a well-documented Nazi problem, what Tyler is referring to here are the moves both companies make: one to empower and protect creators, the other to disempower and restrict. Let’s take a look at some of the most compelling differences.

I got the feeling that throughout this whole rivalry thing, Tyler thought of it as a real strength.

Bill: ”Does going into battle against rivals energize you?”

Tyler: “Totally. Having a rival you actually dislike, even a manufactured one, drives competition and urgency. It's why cost-plus contractors and government work have no incentive. There is no competition driving anyone to be better.

Doing it the right way, where other people also feel motivated by the mission, matters. What I've done with Substack is rooted in something real. I genuinely believe we're on the right side of history. The business model we've built and what we're empowering our users to do is more creator-friendly than most of what's out there. When you believe the work you're doing is the right call, and you know other companies are trying to take your market share, that brings genuine emotion. The more invested and passionate I can be about this company, the more I can rally a team around it.”

Tougher times

Before we continue the piece, I want to make sure I paint a quick picture showing it hasn't been all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows for beehiiv. As per the nature of startups, they’ve certainly encountered their fair share of slow-motion knife fights, along with some genuine heartache.

• The great deliverability meltdown: beehiiv moved too fast, isolating their senders and dumping their best customers into spam for three weeks. Email reputation has no hotfix, so Tyler just had to wait and eat the churn threats. It's where the ConvertKit rivalry got personal.

• The seed extension from hell: 27-year-old Tyler raised $2.6 million, assumed it was infinite, then blew through it on engineers and growth. The extension he thought would close in a week took three months of passes and ghosting VCs, all on fumes.

• The burn scare: beehiiv torched nearly 20 months of runway in 16 weeks, watching it crater from 35 months in January to 16 by May. A hard reset cut the burn rate more than 60% and clawed runway back to 2.5 years. But things were trending downward, fast.

• The growth reset: The early growth team was great at zero-to-one, but couldn't crack $20 million in ARR. Tyler cut a third of the team and paid spend from $700k a month to $50k. It cost them their momentum and eight scary months to win it back.

• The Boost that fizzled: Boost could be a multi-million dollar revenue arm (Sparkloop is a whole company built on the same mechanic). But beehiiv shipped it, then moved on. The classic tax of shipping fast and never circling back.

The most difficult period in beehiiv’s history, though, was the passing of an early team member, Andrew Platkin. Andrew was beehiiv's first CTO and co-founder. Per Tyler, he took a pay cut to lengthen the company’s runway, worked hard and passionately with the team, and then passed away suddenly six months after launch. There's no neat takeaway here. The team taught themselves his code, vested his equity to his mum, and kept shipping as tribute.

Climbing the logo ladder + creator economy 3.0

Another reason the team at beehiiv have been successful is that “Tyler is extremely plugged into the ecosystem, the market, and the customers,” says Preeya. “He truly understands their pain points and how they operate.” If you’ve followed Tyler and beehiiv for any period of time, you’ll see this. Countless events, podcast appearances, and other bits and pieces of PR really add sheen to the beehiiv brand.

This constant drive on the brand side has made it much easier for the sales team to work behind the scenes to win business from other platforms. Remember that snowball from earlier? This is it picking up mass. As Tyler puts it, "You keep climbing based on credibility, logos, and case studies."

If you remember back, this all began with ~20 of 25 strategic angels moving their newsletters over within a month of launch. The first big logo was Litquidity (100k subs, an angel), then Matthew Berry (300k), then Milk Road, all within months. Each logo became a case study that brought the next, bigger logo aboard. They redlined the credibility hill climb until they signed Time, TechCrunch, Newsweek, and Sinclair. Fun fact: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s media arm calls beehiiv home.

When beehiiv started, to be a ‘creator’ meant someone with a podcast and a day job. A side hustle with delusions of grandeur. (Guilty, your honor.) That’s not the world we live in anymore. The creator economy is now a $250B+ industry, bigger than global gaming, and the people in it run themselves like actual businesses. Legacy media and creators have stopped living in separate lanes. Netflix, Spotify, retailers, clothing brands, all piling in. Independent journos who are fully solo but also cutting deals with broadcast giants: from Ezra Klein to Bari Weiss. The whole thing converged while nobody was looking.

beehiiv's bet is that these creators-cum-businesses don't want fifteen tools. They want one. The newsletter is still the beating heart, but stacked on top now: a website builder gunning for Webflow, podcast hosting that pipes you out to Apple and Spotify, subscriber segmentation, a referral program, polls, surveys, automations, and an Ad Network they’re betting on being the best thing since sliced bread. There's a Link in Bio hub, digital products, even webinars. Oh, and an AI layer that builds your site, helps you write, and lets you literally chat with your podcast analytics like it's a mate at a bar.

They're also not done. I know for a fact that the Summer Release 26 launch will have some major community, Ad Network, and content updates, but unfortunately, I’m sworn to secrecy and cannot divulge (you can register to see it for yourself here).

The final big bet worth mentioning is the aforementioned AI layer, particularly the beehiiv MCP. The MCP, which was released in March, is the scion of a family of legendary features, but it may be their greatest one yet, crowning beehiiv the first newsletter platform you can run straight through Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. You can now not only read, but write, using beehiiv’s MCP, all from the comfort of Claude Cowork.

Tyler believes we're barreling toward a world where people stop clicking around inside apps and just tell an AI what they want done. The winners will be those who build for both agents and humans simultaneously. Turns out, if you ain't AI-first, you're last.

💡 Note: If you are looking for the best place to publish your content, you can use the code BILL30 for a 30% off 3 months on beehiiv.

Playbook / how you can apply this

• Ship to change the narrative, not just the product: A weekly launch isn't only a feature, it's a message that, ‘We listen, and we're catching up faster than you can leave.’ beehiiv turned ‘they're missing features’ into ‘they'll have it in a fortnight.’

• Velocity is an org design choice: Full-stack engineers with taste, no handoffs, no separate QA in the early days. Every coordination layer you remove is a speed you gain.

• Do things that don't scale, then refuse to stop: White-glove onboarding got beehiiv its first 24 months for $0 in acquisition. Three years on, every PM still onboards real users by hand.

• Build your roadmap from your inbox: ~50% of the roadmap was direct customer asks. When someone says, ‘I'll switch when you have X,’ build X and call them back in a month.

• Pick a real enemy: Not for spite, for energy and clarity. Watching Substack go social is what told beehiiv who it wasn't.

• Different strokes for different folks (and that's not a failure): Their perfect team for zero-to-one was the wrong fit for $20M→$100M. Knowing the difference and acting on it is the job.

Future

So, where does this end up? Who knows, really? What I do know is that the creator space is in a much better place than it was in the past. And with their chin up, and chest out beehiiv will continue to sprint into this future, with the same exuberance they’ve always had.

Here's the thing, though. Every all-in-one platform on Earth promises this exact roadmap. The graveyard is full of them. The reason to believe beehiiv actually ships it is the same reason you've read this far: it's the one thing they've never once failed to do. I ship, therefore I am. That's the whole bet.

Extra reading / learning

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

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

• beehiiv’s 5-Year Sprint to $20M ARR - August, 2025

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

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TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

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