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💻 Nvidia deep dive: Building the future of everything.
📕 Collection: How to build culture in a startup.
👾 Dedicated to Sora: Entering our brave new world.

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LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

I am pretty excited for today’s interview. Not only is it a deep dive into one of the fastest growing products in tech right now but also a product that I know and love. This email you see, is written on beehiiv, and sent to you, yep, you guessed it, on beehiiv.

That platform is great—clearly the best in the market—but it’s also the fastest shipping and most ambitious company I have nearly ever seen. And it has a community that absolutely loves it. It really is a case study in launching before you are ready, listening to users, building for them and growing a community.

The story of beehiiv and Tyler is a great one. My hope is that after today, whether you care about email infra-tech or not, you follow along. It’s great to watch from the sidelines. Anyway, here is Tyler.

Tyler Denk - Fo-Founder & CEO at Beehiiv

Tyler joined Morning Brew as the second employee, leading product and engineering, and helped them scale up until the acquisition by Business Insider in 2020. He then had a stint at Google as a Product Lead on the YouTube Music team, before ultimately leaving to start beehiiv in 2021, where he is currently the CEO. beehiiv is an all-in-one product suite for newsletters, powering some of the worlds largest and most notable newsletters.

beehiiv recently raised their $12.5M Series A led by Lightspeed Ventures and are now considered to be the only real option for serious newsletter operators starting out today.

Tell us about the problem you are trying to solve. Why this?

Traditionally if you wanted to create content online and build a successful newsletter there were so many disparate platforms and solutions you’d need to stitch together to do it well. At Morning Brew we had 5+ engineers spend years building tons of custom tech to accomplish this.

For example: you’d host the website on Wordpress or Webflow, you’d sync your email content to an ESP like Mailchimp, you’d need to integrate Stripe and Memberful for payments and user authentication, you’d need a separate solution for a referral program, you’d need to build your own dashboards or find a way to ingest your data into some third party solution, and if you wanted to monetize via ads.. that was a whole other solution entirely.

The problem — building something that robust was incredibly difficult and expensive.. not to mention inconvenient to manage all those different platforms and integrations.

The solution — beehiiv. It does everything above plus so much more. It makes enterprise level email software accessible to the masses, and also incorporates bespoke growth and monetization tools so anyone or any team can build a successful newsletter with less friction than ever before.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

Truly no two days are the same, but I’d say there are constant themes to where I spend the majority of my time. First, I focus on new products and features. I want to understand what’s working and what’s not with our users, identifying how our product can improve, see where we’re losing to competitors, and spot where the biggest opportunities are. Then I will work with the team to build product requirements and mockups, and prioritize and re-prioritize the dozens of initiatives on our plates so the engineering team can address accordingly.

Another major part of my day revolves around growth initiatives. We look into how we can scale the business more quickly and efficiently, all while reducing churn. We evaluate our current campaigns, our social media efforts, and where we can invest more time and effort to see a stronger ROI on growth.

Lastly, a significant portion of my time goes into people management. I meet with my reports to unblock them and provide whatever they need to grow, contribute, and succeed, assessing where we are lacking bandwidth or skills and prioritizing new hires accordingly. All that being said, we move extremely fast and there’s constantly shifting priorities based on a multitude of factors on any given day.

Explain your philosophy around leadership? How do you think about it?

I can probably summarize my philosophy on leadership based on three core principles. Transparency and communication are key—I share everything with the team, investors, and more or less the public. This includes our milestones, what’s working, what’s not working, our revenue and costs, etc. With this approach, everyone operates with a full understanding of what’s going on in the business, so everyone can share the urgency of what needs to be improved. I've even written a post on building in public to elaborate on this point.

Autonomy is another principle I strongly adhere to. I don’t burden my team with tons of meetings and oversight. Building on the transparency, everyone knows the core objectives and are expected to execute and take initiative on their own. We hire people who are self-starters and are constantly looking for ways to provide value.

Finally, being results-driven is crucial. At the end of the day, everyone is graded on their effectiveness and how well they were able to accomplish the goals they set out to accomplish with their managers and team. We’re not a charity; they’re employed to drive results.

What is the north star metric inside of your company and why?

We track and monitor quite a few KPIs regularly, but to simplify, MRR is the obvious answer. It encapsulates so many different core objectives we're focused on like acquiring new users, converting those users into paying customers, bringing in larger accounts that contribute more significantly to our revenue, and providing continuous value to reduce churn.

Ensuring our features work as expected and offering best-in-class support are also critical for minimizing churn. Moreover, helping our customers grow and succeed, so they're encouraged to upgrade further, plays a vital role in our strategy.

How do you build culture remotely?

Culture is undoubtedly harder as a remote company, but not impossible. I’d argue (and think most of our employees would agree) that our culture is stronger than 99% of other workplaces they’ve experienced. We keep things light, are always making fun of each other, encourage traveling and healthy lifestyles, and truly share the successes and wins together.

One of the secrets to our success and how we’re able to iterate and move so quickly is we are probably one of the most meeting-light companies you’ll come across. I fucking hate meetings. We don’t waste time talking about doing things, we just do them. Employees write a proposal in a Google Doc, the team provides feedback async via comments, we find alignment, maybe hop on a 5 minute huddle on Slack, and then execute.

Also, for an hour each Monday and Friday the entire company gets together. Even at 50 employees, every single person gets a chance to speak during all hands. It gives everyone at the company a voice. Everyone is doing something impactful and I want them to have an opportunity to share it with the team. It overall keeps people engaged.

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I believe it’s also important to make people feel seen and appreciated — you need to be much more intentional about this as a remote company. We have a #kudos channel where employees routinely shoutout others when someone goes above and beyond to accomplish something. I’m also very intentional about giving shoutouts whenever I can.

We also do a once annual offsite to get the full team together. These have been full of breakthroughs, memories, and fun… and I view them as invaluable. Plus, every person at the company owns shares in the company. There is a shared camaraderie and sense of ownership in advancing the success of the business for everyone’s gain.

Despite everything, I’d argue there are three things to have in mind: results matter, people matter, and validation matters. The rest will usually follow.

I’ll also plug one of my absolute favorite business books: No Rules Rules, of which we’ve adopted a lot of things from.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire all-star talent?

We don’t do anything out of the ordinary here, and I don’t have any real secrets. The main key for us is just being incredibly patient and never compromising on quality. Making the wrong hire or bringing down the level of ‘talent density’ is such a drain on the organization and makes every team run slower, and makes everyone enjoy their job just a little less.

So we’re incredibly incredibly patient to a fault. We hold out until we have a candidate that completely blows us away and we have full conviction on the hire. Sometimes that means hiring processes run for a pretty long time, with a trade-off of having less bandwidth. But it’s always worth the wait.

How do you set goals?

I’m a huge fan of Traction, which is a book and framework based on EoS. We first kicked off this process at the end of 2023 and are working through our quarterly goals as we speak.

TL;DR we have a long-term 5 year vision of where we want the company to be. We have a 3 year goal, a 1 year goal, and then break everything up into quarterly goals that align with the trajectory we have outlined in the longer-term goals.

What is your process for shipping product?

In the 26 months since we launched beehiiv, we've built a reputation for constantly shipping new features, but that was never our goal; it happened out of necessity. When we entered the market, the competition was fierce with Substack, Twitter's Revue, Facebook's Bulletin, and others setting a high bar. Our initial offering was extremely limited, lacking even the most basic features.

My process for shipping products comes from our early challenges. With my co-founders all being engineerings, we spent our initial months coding, learning, and setting the company's foundation. This period was crucial in shaping how we build product. We wanted it to be rapid, focused, and always forward-moving.

Our early hiring strategy focused on ‘unicorn engineers’ - those who could own a feature end to end. This meant looking for engineers who were not only great in full-stack development but also had a sense of product and design, and understood the broader context of our users and business. This allowed us to be selective, optimizing our team's performance and output from day one.

We've always had a clear roadmap, driven from previous experience, competitor offerings, and, most importantly, user feedback. This allows us to constantly prioritize and re-prioritize initiatives, assigning them to engineers who can then action them as quickly as possible. Our philosophy has always been to prioritize progress over perfection, shipping features that may not be polished but can be improved upon quickly based on real user feedback.

Mistakes, in this environment, are expected. We've built a culture where mistakes are accepted as long as we learn from them. This mentality, along with our commitment to rapid iteration and feedback, has been key for us to ship features at a pace that few companies can match.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I am one of the most habit and routine based people I know. Not necessarily because I enjoy the rigidness of the routine, but almost out of necessity to ensure I am mentally and physically in the best state to perform. I don’t compromise on my morning routine. I wake up early—usually before 6am, I stretch, meditate, hit the gym, shower, then read emails.

And I don’t compromise on my night routine where I study Spanish, read for 30-45 minutes before bed, and be asleep by 10:30pm latest. I value quality sleep a ton. I also eat extremely healthy and almost the same thing every weekday. I like to ensure I eat healthy, and also to minimize choice and wasting time.

Would I like a bit more flexibility in my life? Absolutely. But right now my top priority by a mile is building beehiiv into an industry-defining success story and I’m doing whatever I can to increase the odds of that.

And that's it! You can check out beehiiv’s platform here and his newsletter Big Desk Energy. You can subscribe with 1-click here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

First piece of brain food for you today is this 2023 State of Venture Report by CB Insights. It’s a mind-boggoogling 261 page or nerdy goodness. If you—like me—nerd out on the data around the markets then you’ll enjoy flicking through this.

More brain food to flex your thinking muscles on is this course by Apollo. Outbound gets harder every day. But if you can crack it, it's a great channel. Take it from me—70% of our pipeline at Athyna comes from outbound.

Luckily, if you want to learn best practices, Apollo does courses now. They just launched the Apollo Academy. Learn from the best in the game. Get yourself in your prospects inboxes now.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we use inside of our businesses. Today we are highlighting Deel — the only HR platform with everything you need, for everyone. EOR, contractor management, immigration and more.

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

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️