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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.

🧠 Building A Second Brain With Claude Cowork. The ultimate guide to one of the most elusive tools.
✍🏻 Building The Incorruptible Companies Of The Future. An interview with Eric Ries, Author of Incorruptible.
🐝 When David Ate Goliath: beehiiv’s Zero To One. The scaleup with attitude that’s killing the competition.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Not sure if you noticed, but I tried something new in our most recent edition. Firstly, the content type was new, but also the Housekeeping section was replaced by a Heat Check section. Heat check, meaning a poll on a trending topic; in this case, the budding Apple v OpenAI court case. Here were the results.

I read a newsletter called The Tangle, which does a number of pulse check-type surveys on the U.S. political ecosystem, and I find it fascinating. We have such a large audience now, I figured it could be an interesting way for us to ‘read the room’ in tech, so to speak. Did you like it? Would love to get some feedback. Thanks!

ZERO TO ONE 🌱

Tyler Denk, Co-Founder & CEO at beehiiv

Tyler Denk is the Co-Founder & CEO at beehiiv. He was Morning Brew’s second employee, and in four years, he led product, engineering, and growth, building the referral program, content management system, and ad stack that helped Morning Brew scale to 4M readers before selling to Business Insider for $75M in 2020. After a brief stint at Google, Tyler co-founded beehiiv in 2021 with two former Morning Brew engineers, Ben Hargett and Jake Hurd. The company launched in October that year and has since raised roughly $50M, including a $33M Series B at a $225M valuation in April 2024. Revenue has tracked from near zero to an estimated $30M in annualized revenue by mid-2025, with clients now including Time, TechCrunch, Newsweek, and Sinclair.

beehiiv wasn't built by someone who spotted a market gap from the outside. It was built by someone who had lived inside the most successful newsletter of the past decade, was frustrated that nothing on the market could do what they'd already built internally, and decided to do it. He builds in public, ships product every week, and runs a personal newsletter (Big Desk Energy) with over 100,000 subscribers. The result is a company that has taken direct aim at Substack's business model, treats product velocity as a genuine operating philosophy, and has climbed from scrappy challenger to platform of record for some of the biggest media brands in the world.

Why are you suited to build this product?

Where a lot of people have built companies in this space purely from the angle of ‘I want to build a software platform,’ we came at it differently. We'd already built this internally at Morning Brew as a case study, and it worked extremely well. We scaled to four million readers and a $75M exit. We sat next to the content team (the people actually creating the newsletter day-to-day) and really understood what they wanted from a product to build an incredible newsletter. On the other side, we sat next to the sales team and all the brand partnerships people, and understood what they were doing daily to sell Morning Brew, to monetize it, and to do the tracking. We're still very true to the newsletter ecosystem today. We've expanded to a bunch of different products, but the newsletter is definitely at the core, and I think Morning Brew is one of the best case studies of a successful newsletter in the past decade.

What made you confident you could take market share?

The way I look at that question, most of the incumbents are typical ESPs. Dozens and dozens of email platforms that, fundamentally, send emails. If you were creating content on the internet and wanted to do what Morning Brew did—website, newsletter, growth tools, monetization—those are all different pieces. When I was there, we used MailChimp, then Campaign Monitor, then Sailthru. All three only did one of the fifteen things we needed as a scaling media company, and that was sending emails. As someone who'd used all of those ESPs, I knew how frustrating they were and how little they'd invested in the product experience. They were also expensive. A lot of them had gone through acquisitions and weren't innovating the way hungry startups do when they're chasing market share. There was also a consolidation opportunity. The product itself only did one of many things, and we wanted something that did a lot of things together to help us build and scale.

And then there was Substack, which came to market about three or four years before beehiiv. At the time, the product was genuinely poor, and a lot of people on Twitter were very critical of it. They'd clearly struck a nerve with the independent media, newsletter-first, VC-backed angle, but I was pretty confident that what we'd built internally at Morning Brew was already more advanced and more capable than the core Substack product. If we could just productize what we'd built internally, there was a huge market, and all of the signals pointed in that direction.

Who were the first people you brought onto the team?

The initial team was me, plus Ben and Jake, my two engineering co-founders. They were still employed at Morning Brew, had good jobs, and it took a lot of convincing to get them to make the leap. But they bought in during the summer leading up to launch—summer 2021. We also got Andrew Platkin to join as our initial CTO, so before we'd even launched, it was essentially four engineers. The thesis on those first hires was simple: we are so far behind. All of our competitors had been around for years. There was a massive surface area to catch up on. It took five engineers and four years to build what we built at Morning Brew, and that was for one customer. To build it for thousands of customers meant an incredibly heavy engineering roadmap, so the first five hires were all engineers.

Eventually, we got to a point where we had a few hundred paying customers, growing a couple of dozen sign-ups a day, and while the engineers were building, someone had to handle everything else. Customer support, onboarding, emails, customer success. It was all falling to me while I was also trying to build, so we made what I called a ‘community hire’ (really, everything that wasn't engineering). Around employee seven or eight, we realized that person wasn't quite the right fit for the role. That's what got me talking to Preeya. She had been my Account Manager at Sailthru, where Morning Brew was a customer, and she was incredible. Any time I had problems or was creating headaches, she was super quick to address everything. Professional, knew her stuff better than any other account manager or vendor I'd ever worked with. I went to her to get a read on our support situation. She confirmed what I suspected about the existing hire, and then came in to replace them, not in some entry-level role but as Chief of Staff, taking over everything that wasn't engineering. So the first ten people were roughly seven engineers, Preeya running everything else, and EJ as our first growth lead.

What has Preeya's impact been since she joined?

Preeya is incredible at what she does. She spent six or seven years at Campaign Monitor and Sailthru, so she knows the email industry like the back of her hand. Sailthru is a very enterprise business with around five hundred customers, all high-paying media companies. She's handled customer comms at that level and is deeply familiar with how the biggest players in our industry operate.

She's also just exceptionally well-spoken and organized. Any time a user needed to complain about something, that used to fall entirely on me. She became someone who handles it better than I can, and brings all of the soft skills around communication and customer success that I don't always have the bandwidth for. And she never drops the ball. Whether it's 2 am her time, she'll fire off a message with an update, nothing's slipped through. The more you scale a company, the more you realize how rare that is. Someone you can hand any task to and it just gets done, and done well. A lot of people need constant follow-up. She's the opposite of that. She takes ownership and pulls things off your plate. At an early-stage startup, you need those jack-of-all-trades who can just execute.

How did you win noteworthy publishers in the early days?

Even before Milk Road, our first big customer was Liquidity, the meme account. The way we got them was straightforward, as he'd invested in the company. That was the shortcut in the early days. I went through all of our initial angel investors, and a number of them had newsletters. There was a guy named Gannon Breslin who had a newsletter of about 25k people. Not a huge name, but we needed traction.

We raised from about 25 angels, and I'd say 20 of them moved their newsletters over within a month of us launching. Forever indebted to them for that. Liquidity was definitely the biggest one. He had 100k subscribers on MailerLite, and we couldn't do more than 10% of what it could do 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 Liquidity 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 4M readers. We already have Liquidity with 100k subscribers, and his open rates are better.’

The other big early success story that jumps out is Matthew Berry, the ESPN fantasy football personality who left ESPN to build his own media company. We had a mutual connection, hit it off, and he moved off PlayVio onto us. That was 300k subscribers. So within the first month, we had Liquidity, a few months later, Matthew Berry, and Milk Road were right around that time too. We recently signed Time as a large enterprise client, TechCrunch, Newsweek, and parlayed that into closing a deal with Sinclair, which is a massive media conglomerate. You keep doing that, climbing based on credibility, logos, and case studies.

What was the lead domino in the zero-to-one stage?

Product velocity and product-led growth were our MO and what we're best known for. But it truly came out of necessity, almost out of insecurity. When Liquidity moved his newsletter over, we could probably do 10% of what MailerLite did, and I knew it. Every single day, users reached out to complain that we weren't up to par with other platforms. I'd wake up to 15 angry emails from people asking for things they could easily do on their old platform, threatening to leave if we didn't build it. And Liquidity alone represented about a tenth of our revenue. So I literally had a tenth of our revenue threatening to churn in my inbox every single morning.

That anxiety and urgency are what pushed us to move quickly and hire more engineers. Our entire product launch strategy came from 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 lets us punch well above our weight. Layered in there is the building in public. I'm showing that I genuinely care, that we do listen to customer feedback, and that I'm personally in DMs answering questions and prioritizing tickets. Those things combined drove a lot of our early growth.

How have you built and maintained that product velocity?

Part of it is what I just described. It was build-or-die for the first two years. Only now I feel calm enough that if something we planned to launch tomorrow isn't ready, I can push it to next week. In the early days, that would have killed us. Every day we waited was potentially costing us churn. More tactically, of our first ten hires, seven were engineers. We made it very clear we were an engineering-first company. We also hired full-stack engineers who skewed heavily toward product and design, and I think that's the real secret.

One of my co-founders, Ben, is the most creative, design-forward engineer I've ever come across. Whatever he touches is beautiful, and he doesn't need mockups at all; he just has taste. So we cut out the need for designers entirely. No design handoff. No front-end to back-end handoff. No separate QA process. The engineers QA'd themselves, and the product was less complex in those early days, so that was manageable. Once you build that muscle and create that DNA, once the pace is what it is, it's really hard to slow it down. People would feel bored if we stopped. We've established that this is our operating cadence, and that's just how it runs.

What were the most difficult moments in the zero-to-one stage?

Every day felt like a roller coaster, honestly, and it kind of still does. On the operational side, raising our seed extension was a real education. We'd raised $2.6M at seed, and as a first-time founder at twenty-seven, you naively think the money will last forever because you can't even comprehend how you'd spend it. Then you start hiring good engineers who have well-paying jobs and want a 401(k) and health insurance, and you hire a growth person who wants to run paid acquisition. So you realize $2.6M isn't a lot.

We had to go out and raise a seed extension about six months later. I naively thought we were at 15-20k MRR and growing fast, given clear product-market fit. I walked into that process thinking we'd close in a week. It took three months, tons of passes, and we ended up closing with a couple of UK-based funds. Every minute of that process was painful because we were fighting fires and trying to scale revenue with not much runway left. A lot of those early-stage funds took me for a ride. Email deliverability was another one. There's a lot of infrastructure behind the scenes (IP addresses, sender reputation), and we got burned a few times early on as a learning experience. We'd tried to isolate our best senders from unproven senders to protect deliverability, which is pretty standard for any ESP. We just moved too quickly, and our best senders ended up in spam for two weeks.

That was brutal because we'd essentially taken our highest-paying customers and screwed up the one thing we were supposed to do well: deliver their email. The fix wasn't a quick bug patch. The only way to correct email reputation is to wait it out while it course-corrects over three weeks. So every day for three weeks, I was fielding threats from users wanting to leave, taking it to social, furious. I actually sat up one night with one of our investors and drafted a ten-tweet apology. Then we decided against it. It would have made it worse, and email deliverability is too nuanced to explain on Twitter anyway. And then when Nathan Barry and ConvertKit started emailing our users to tell them about the mistake—essentially saying they would never do that at ConvertKit because they actually know what they're doing—that was infuriating. But we were also genuinely vulnerable. Not much cash, best users are all experiencing a problem we've caused. Not a position of strength.

Does going into battle against rivals energize you?

Totally. I think every company benefits from having some kind of enemy or rival. Even outside of companies, like sports teams, 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. No competition is driving anyone to be better. Michael Jordan would just manufacture rivalries out of thin air, make them completely fictitious, and it worked.

I think doing it the right way, where other people in the company also feel motivated by the mission, matters. 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 actually believe the work you're doing is the right call, and you know other companies are trying to take your market share and your customers, and you care about it that much, that's a genuine emotion. The more emotionally invested and passionate I can be about this company, the more I can build and accomplish without burning out, and the more I can rally a team around it.

What’s your approach to personal wellness? And how do you transfer that to beehiiv?

On the personal side, I've always been active. Workouts, physical activity, and eating well. I've always prioritized my physical health. Mentally, I was firmly in the ‘I'll fix mental health later’ camp when I was younger. I don't need to sleep, I don't need to meditate, I'll just push through the burnout because the exit will solve all of this eventually.

Travel wears on me a lot. As the company has grown, I've been trying to get better at saying no, but I still end up flying from South America to London for a three-day trip to meet with top media executives because the comms team insists I have to be in the room. And then there's SXSW, Cannes, all of that. Last year, I hit a real wall of burnout trying to manage a 60-hour work week while also jumping between time zones. I realized I had to actually change things, or I wouldn't be able to keep doing this. A lot of small habits have added up, like meditating and cutting back on coffee. Even after I'd finished everything on my to-do list for the day, I'd still feel this anxious sense that I wasn't doing enough. When I cut coffee, that went away immediately.

Being on the West Coast with most of the team on the East Coast or in Europe, I used to wake up at 5:30 am, already drowning in Slack messages about what was broken, angry customers, and fires to put out. That's the least healthy way to start the day. Now I do a full morning routine before I even touch my phone. I want space to actually think for myself before I'm reacting to everything I'll have to deal with anyway. I can wait thirty or forty minutes.

I'm careful about talking about a four-day work week right now—we're burning a million dollars a month, and there's a lot of runway to cover before that makes sense. But we're at a point in the company's maturity where employee satisfaction and retention are genuinely one of the most important things we can focus on. If a three-year engineer leaves, it takes four months to find someone equivalent, two months to onboard them, and a year to match their context in the business. It's far better to pay people well and create a place they actually want to be.

Preeya Goenka, Chief Customer Officer at beehiiv

Preeya Goenka is Chief Customer Officer at beehiiv. She joined the team in late 2022 as employee #7, first as Chief of Staff and then Chief Operating Officer, before being promoted to Chief Customer Officer in January 2026. Before beehiiv, she spent six years at CM Group (now Marigold), rising through customer success roles across Sailthru and Campaign Monitor, then ran go-to-market strategy at Noogata, a Series A AI company.

Preeya first met Tyler Denk nearly a decade before joining beehiiv, when she was his vendor at Sailthru, and he was building Morning Brew. When he eventually pitched her on joining, the company had almost no features and was entering what looked like one of the most crowded markets around, yet another email platform. She joined anyway. For the first two years, beehiiv spent zero dollars on acquisition. Everything ran on personal onboarding, white-glove support, and a roadmap built almost entirely from what customers actually asked for. By the time legacy publishers like Hearst were doing due diligence on the platform, that early customer obsession was already baked in.

How did you end up at beehiiv?

Almost four years ago, I was employee number seven. I had met Tyler about ten years before joining, when I was working at Sailthru and Campaign Monitor. That was a portfolio of email companies I was at for about six years, while Tyler was at Morning Brew. I was one of his vendors. We worked together pretty closely for a couple of years, kept in touch, and then he launched beehiiv. He was very active on social even back then, so I was following along from the sidelines, watching him post about the launch, the announcement, and how the early days were going.

One day, when we were catching up, and he was filling me in on what he was building, he was picking my brain on how to think about hiring someone to own pretty much everything else besides engineering.

I remember in one of those early conversations, I was semi-teasing him, but also kind of probing why he decided to start an email company. From my perspective, it was the most crowded space. But he was telling me about his vision, and yes, it was an email platform, but there were so many other components he was layering on top. He had a very clear vision for the direction he was building in and a long-term plan for what the product would be. The way he envisioned building beehiiv was very much about filling a real gap in the market. Very different from any other email platform I was familiar with, so it felt like a really strong proposition and a good opportunity.

What did the role actually look like in those early days?

I was definitely a jack-of-all-trades. The company was almost all engineering. Tyler was pretty much doing everything around product and growth. Everything else was kind of under my scope. Mostly all customer-facing work. For the bigger customers already on the platform, I was their high-touch point of contact at beehiiv. It was a combination of support tickets, managing the entire sales, product demos, post-sales, onboarding, an ongoing success flywheel, and then layering on operations. I can't really call it operations because there aren't really operations at an eight-person company. It's just about doing the work while establishing some kind of process as you go. That was probably about 50% of the work.

The other 50% was things that popped up every day that Tyler didn't have bandwidth for. We'd tag-team whatever had to get done. Every day felt like a list of 50 things. Tyler would say, I'll do these 25, you do these 25, rinse and repeat. A lot of putting out fires, a lot of small things that had to get done, a lot of chipping away at the bigger items. We were just bouncing around different areas of the company, trying to get things done as fast as possible.

How did you win customers when the product barely existed?

A few different things. Tyler was a newsletter person through and through, and I had some of that email experience myself. So we led with that in all these conversations. The message was that we understand your problems and challenges, and we're building a platform specifically to address them. I felt like that touched a very raw pain point for many of the customers we were working with at the time. They all probably agreed that the email platform they were using wasn't the perfect fit for them. beehiiv wasn't the perfect fit yet either, but we were building in the direction that actually addressed their problems, versus other platforms that were building e-commerce solutions that had nothing to do with what these customers were trying to do.

We were also extremely user-focused. If a customer said, "I like beehiiv, but I can't use it until you have these five things," we'd say, "Let me get back to you in a month." And we would actually get back to them in a month with those features built. Even now, a large portion of our roadmap is driven directly by customer requests. Back then, it was probably 50/50. Half was what we knew we had to build to be a competitive email platform, and the other half was just what prospects told us they needed or what customers already on the platform said they'd churn without. I don't think a lot of these newsletter operators and publishers were used to that kind of high-touch support. They definitely weren't used to companies actually following through on feature request promises. That went a very long way.

What was the main pain point you were solving that others weren't?

No other email platform, or maybe none at all, really understood the workflow of a newsletter-first operator, a publisher, or a media company. What it actually takes to create an email and get it out to your audience.

beehiiv had one very singular use case: we're built for media, for publishers, for people sharing their content. Every step in the email creation workflow is intuitive and built for that purpose. Newsletter operators care most about two things—growth and monetization. We're an all-in-one solution with features built into the core platform for both. If you're using MailChimp, you probably have six different integrations to grow and monetize your list, since MailChimp doesn't do it natively. We understood the pain points of what these people were trying to do and built a platform to address them directly.

What are the early wins that stick out?

There was a phase when we were probably post-Series A but still very, very young, both as a company and as a product. We were talking to some of the world's biggest publishers. A lot of massive global media companies were in our pipeline and actively doing due diligence on beehiiv. In that moment, win or lose, the fact that we were sitting at the table alongside enterprise solutions as a two-year-old company was actually insane. It was a great learning experience. You understand how these companies actually buy, and it's a very different world when you're selling to organizations like that. But it was such a good feeling, because I came from an enterprise email solutions background where those companies had been around for ten or fifteen years. Just having a shot at that kind of business was a nice win.

The other moment that sticks out is around the ad network. One of our big value props is that whatever you're paying for beehiiv, you should ideally be earning a lot more through the platform's native monetization tools, whether that's paid subscriptions, the ad network, or something else. We don't take a cut of any of it. When we first rolled out the ad network, we didn't really lead with that value prop because it was still new. But I remember one of those early calls, when someone had this aha moment, realizing they could earn this much money from running one ad, which was more than what they were paying for beehiiv for the entire month. And that's exactly what we're trying to do here. Having them arrive at that conclusion before we'd even prompted it was a really nice feeling.

What was the most important thing beehiiv did to drive early success?

It comes down to how much we focus on the customer. Every SaaS company loves to say they're user-first. I've worked at several other tech companies, bigger and smaller, and none of them came close to how much beehiiv focused on the user experience. That's definitely true now, but in the early days, when every customer was kind of make-or-break for the business, it was even more the focus.

Being only seven people, we all had to do it. We personally onboarded every customer, listened to their feature requests, and hopped on calls with them. It was ‘Let me personally import your list. Let me personally help you build your template. Let me keep an eye on your analytics. Let me talk to you a few times a week to make sure things are going well.’ I can almost guarantee they'd never had that kind of high-touch, white-glove experience anywhere else. And that kind of message travels very fast through word of mouth.

As people started using beehiiv, they knew it might not have these ten features they needed, but they had our entire exec team on speed dial, and the way we were paying attention to them is so invaluable. So they'd tell their newsletter friends, post about it, and word traveled fast. Which also connects to the other part: we didn't spend a single dollar on acquisition for the first eighteen to twenty-four months. Everything was entirely through word of mouth and social media. Tyler was building in public. We'd share customer stories, case studies, and wins. When customers shared their newsletters, we'd repost them, engage with them, and help amplify their messages. That energy on social is what propelled us in those early days.

Why are you still at beehiiv?

And even four years in, I feel like we're still so early in terms of what we're building. We start every year with a twelve-month roadmap that feels, in January, like we have all the time in the world to build all these incredible things. Then you start slotting things into the quarter and realize the ten things you thought you'd get to this year won't even fit into the next year. There's just so much left to do.

What makes Tyler good at what he does?

He's extremely plugged into the ecosystem, the market, and the customers. He truly understands their pain points and how they operate. He understands the competitive landscape, who the other players are, and why someone might use a different platform. He talks to customers all the time and does lots of sales calls. He's deeply ingrained in the space, and that makes it a lot easier to build the right product.

He's also very good at staying focused. Many founders and CEOs get distracted. They want to raise this round, chase the next thing, do this. He knows what he's committed to, and he sticks to it. There isn't much space for that kind of distraction with him. He's very focused on what he needs to do and build.

Has the creator economy grown the way you expected?

Way more than I expected. But its definition has also changed a lot. Before, the creator was very much a side hustle that might become the main thing. Someone with a podcast or writing in their free time, starting to monetize it a little. That was largely what the creator economy looked like when we started. Now it's very much a business, and people operate it like one. And what I didn't foresee was the emergence of a hybrid world, bridging legacy media and business with new-age media and the creator economy. Companies like Netflix and Spotify, which were in their own lanes in how they approached media within their specific verticals, are now leaning in more and more with content creators. Retail companies, clothing brands, and companies I never thought would care so much about creators are now investing very heavily in that space.

Creators are running themselves more and more like businesses and finding ways to work with the legacy companies. You see independent journalists who are fully independent but also working in some capacity with larger broadcast media companies. There's this really interesting convergence of many different elements that I didn't foresee when we started.

Shreya Srikanth, Product Manager at beehiiv

Shreya Srikanth, Product Manager at beehiiv, joined the team over three years ago as the first product hire in the company's history. When she joined, beehiiv was still at seed stage, the whole team was fewer than twenty people, and Tyler was personally PMing everything himself. Since she teamed up, beehiiv has crossed $30M in annualized revenue by mid-2025 and grown to serve over 55,000 active creators.

Shreya is not a founder, but she has the institutional memory of one. She got the job by cold-reaching out to the CEO with a list of product ideas that matched where he was already thinking. Three years later, she manages the core platform roadmap for a product that ships faster than arguably any SaaS company of its size from a structure of three PMs, two designers, and roughly 50 engineers that by any normal logic shouldn't work, but somehow does. Her perspective is from inside the engine room, from the nights triaging support tickets with Tyler to now.

When did you join beehiiv, and why?

I joined in May 2023. At the time, I was looking for an early-stage company, a startup environment, and I wanted a product that people genuinely loved. While doing my LinkedIn research, what stood out to me were the comments users were leaving on beehiiv's posts. People were raving.

There was this real human touch, almost a craze around the product, that made me feel like there's something genuinely cool here.

How has your role evolved since then?

I was actually the first product hire at beehiiv. Until then, it was just Tyler PMing everything. I remember being super excited. I reached out to him with a list of ideas and things we could build, and it resonated with him because it was roughly where he thought the product was headed anyway. I joined, and it was, as it is with any early startup, kind of no man's land. You do fifteen different things, but my main role in those early days was to help make sure the team was always building the most important thing next. Keeping that organized across workflows and helping execute. I was also leaning heavily on user feedback. We didn't have a fleshed-out support team, so I was the last barrier. I was triaging that every night and looping in engineers the next morning. Tyler and I did that together every single night for a while. It was hectic; I honestly don't know how we survived it. At that point, Tyler was still at the helm of the high-level vision, and I was his right hand for executing day-to-day operations. I learned a lot during that process.

What do you think fostered that early craze around beehiiv?

Definitely the fact that people got direct access to the people building beehiiv. Every early user got a DM from Tyler on LinkedIn when they were verified. People would get responses to their tweets and support tickets, and Tyler would personally sign off on them. I think you feel really special when the company's CEO is paying attention to the issue you're facing with their product. It makes you feel genuinely valued.

We’ve always been so in tune with what users wanted, constantly monitoring everything. I think that's ultimately what helped us build the right next thing every time. The people using it were telling us exactly what they wanted.

How have you built a culture of shipping so fast, at such high quality?

Product velocity is definitely our superpower, and I think it comes down to the people and the way we approach projects. In traditional product management, it's always weeks or months of figuring out what to build, a long document, fifteen stakeholders reviewing it, rounds of back and forth, then it hits engineering for a tech review, then design, and it's this whole process. At beehiiv, the moment we identify something exciting to build, we have a PRD within 24 hours. With Claude Code now, I'll usually generate wireframes or mockups right away, and designers and engineers jump in immediately. We're starting development and design work before the vision is even 100% set in stone. We tackle each problem as it comes up, as long as we know the core opportunity and the core functionality we need. We have really quick feedback loops.

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 wonders how we can make something work in such a short timeframe. That attitude is pretty rare, and it comes from the people's mindset and everyone being willing to roll with the punches. Everyone is a kind of equal stakeholder in solving the problem. No rigid lanes. All the work happens in parallel.

Our engineers are genuinely exceptional. You can give them a ticket that's one sentence with a Slack thread linked, and they'll come back with something 80% of the way there. PMs and designers come in at the end and make a couple of tweaks to improve user-friendliness. The caliber of talent means you can give someone a vague prompt and they'll just run with it. Everyone who joined early has that level of ownership. The last piece is that everyone is working on multiple things at once. An engineer is typically working on a feature, while also building a one-off request, and probably tackling bugs from a previous feature, too. All at the same time. Every day, people are context-switching. We try to protect people from that, but honestly, the fact that everyone's been doing it constantly is what lets us launch fifteen things in a quarter instead of three.

What does the PM-designer-engineer structure look like?

We have three PMs plus a Head of Product, two designers, and somewhere around forty to fifty engineers. So the product team is very lean. That works because our PMs—especially with the current AI tools—generate mockups and wireframes tied to the design system our designers have built. By the time a concept hits a designer, they're not building it from scratch because they can already see the PM's vision and jump from there. The same logic applies to engineers. Everyone's empowered to run, and that makes all of our roles pretty scalable.

What was something that bombed in the early days?

One thing that didn't go well was that we'd launch a feature and immediately move on to the next one. There's a feature called ‘Boost’ that, in theory, could have become a multi-million-dollar revenue arm for the business. Sparkloop is an entire company built on that same mechanic. But we launched it and left it as is. It just became a feature people complained about constantly. It became a real time and energy sink for a long time. We couldn't even invest in fixing it because we were always moving forward to the next thing. I have many examples of that same story. We launched at maybe 30% of what the feature needed to be, then moved on. We never got the full benefit for users or for the business.

That said, I think shipping fast and shipping early was actually the right call for that stage. Back then, people would have left the platform if we didn't have even a basic version of certain features. There's a time when you just need to say “we have this”. The key is that the team has to evolve its approach as the company grows. In the early days, a bug wouldn't have impacted anyone meaningfully. Now, a bug is affecting Time magazine's newsletter, which has 400k subscribers. The stakes are completely different. A big part of my roadmap today is going back, simplifying features, making them actually useful, and tracking proper success metrics. It’s not launching new functionality, but going deeper on what's already there.

How did you think about competitors?

There were two categories. The old incumbents just confused us. They never seemed to ship anything. We really wondered what everyone was doing over there. That said, we respected what they'd built since they clearly figured out the constituent parts—the foundation for newsletters, email campaigns, and traditional email use cases. I'd always have a FigJam open with screenshots of every flow and believed we could do that ten times better. Not easily, but we could. They were inspirational in the sense that they showed us the users’ needs. Our job was to figure out how to do it better.

The newer competitors were more serious because users would actually jump between them and us. They were real competition. But with Substack, we could clearly see they were moving in a different direction (notes, social, discoverability, and algorithm). That was actually really helpful for us, because it forced us to find clarity. We realized we weren't actually a Substack competitor. Internally, we don't even really think of them as direct competition. Watching them go social helped us sharpen our own message—own your audience, direct relationship, no algorithms. With Kit, the relationship is a bit more combative, at least from Tyler's side. But that also came from the fact that they ship very slowly, and they spent months just talking about their rebrand. That made us lean harder into our own strength: we're actually shipping functionality. Every time a competitor did something, it helped us discover that we have our own lane. Now, when I scope a new feature, I'll still look at what competitors are doing, but we're increasingly building on our own instincts.

What cadences does the product and engineering team live by?

We have quarterly roadmaps, and within that, we run three-week sprints followed by one-week cooldowns. Each quarter is three sprints and three cooldowns. The sprints are where the bulk of feature work happens. Each engineer typically has one to two major features per quarter, and each sprint usually covers one project. Cooldowns are for bugs and quality-of-life improvements. We always set extremely ambitious timelines, and as we approach those deadlines, the decision to launch or hold a bit longer kicks in.

Each week, we have two company-wide syncs where everyone shares what they're working on. There's also a weekly tech sync for engineering, product, and design. Then the individual project syncs, plus people are always ready to hop on a huddle. Every day, we try to list the 10 things they want to get done. Tuesdays and Thursdays are no-meetings focus days, so those are the days people really grind through their lists. And there's always a rough announcement date from Tyler for new features, which is the North Star. We do our best not to waste a single day.

What's changed inside product and engineering since you joined?

The big mindset shift is that back then, the question was around the bare minimum we could ship, while today the question is what's the best possible version of this feature.

The second thing is data. We never looked at data back then. Someone was commenting on a LinkedIn post, so we figured people were probably using the feature. Now we actually pull the numbers. We look at how people are using it, how much they're earning from it, and use that to drive decisions. More data-driven thinking, plus quality over quantity and functionality. Those two things are the biggest changes.

What's the vision for the product going forward?

The original vision was simple: nail newsletters. The natural evolution from there was thinking about what else these creators use. We realized that most serious beehiiv users are also using WordPress, Discord, and something else on top. So the next step was clear: build an insanely good website builder because that's where your content lives. And we built that.

Then we looked at podcasting. We tested the waters by adding an audio feature to newsletters that let you convert an issue into audio, and we saw a big uptick. And doing market analysis, we found that people with podcasts were actually trying to get into newsletters, and vice versa. So we built podcasting. The next step, coming in July, is community. You've already got all these ways to reach your audience with content—newsletters, podcasts, your website—but how do you actually turn that into a meaningful two-way stream? A lot of our users' current stack includes Discord, Reddit, or Slack. We want to replace that.

The goal is to be the one-stop shop for everything a creator needs to run their business. On top of newsletter, website, podcast, and community, you have subscriptions and the ad network. And we don’t take a cut. Eventually, the goal is to let you run ads across your podcast, newsletter, and website. Right now, that's only live for newsletters because that's where we started. Every way you can reach and engage your audience directly, and every way you can turn that into revenue. That's what we're building toward.

Why do you still work at beehiiv today?

Honestly, so much of it is the people. One of my teammates described it well: it feels like being on a high-powered sports team. Everyone does their part, everyone's a go-getter who's really good at their job, but everyone's also fun and goofy. Our all-hands calls and our Slack channels are genuinely silly. People can be themselves. It's not a cutthroat startup environment. People here actually care. We get a Friday off every month—we call it a Monthly Wellness Day—because the founders are committed to people not burning out. That balance, where everyone works really hard and strives for their goals but also shows up as a human being, is rare. Everyone at this company also has some side project or passion project they're absolutely killing at, on top of their job. It's an inspiring place to be.

That matters. You want to work somewhere you feel valued and where your feedback means something.

And I actually love the job itself. There's no bureaucracy, no politics. You can drop an idea in Slack, people jump on it, debate it with you, and the next thing you know, it's something being worked on. That doesn't happen in most places. Most jobs get mundane, repetitive, and bureaucratic. Here, it's a creative space where everyone can pitch in, and everyone cares.

What are Tyler's strengths?

Setting an ambitious pace. He'll come in with the important thing to solve, boost us, and set a timeline. It's almost like a challenge. Instead of sitting and debating it for three weeks, let's actually put something together. You get people excited, rally them, give them a timeline, and nudge them toward it. That ability to create momentum on a dime is genuinely one of his strengths.

He also works harder than anyone I know. He'll personally DM and respond to every employee. Even at the scale we're at now, he knows what every single person is working on. He'll jump into a random thread, give feedback on something, and immediately go back to whatever he was doing that's ten times more important. That no-ego thing—I will jump into anything and unblock whoever needs it—he genuinely embodies that, and it carries through the whole company.

Extra reading

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

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

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

• When David Ate Goliath: beehiiv’s Zero To One - July, 2026

And that’s it! You can keep up with Tyler, Preeya, and Shreya on LinkedIn or check out beehiiv on their website.

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