We raised a $12.5 million Series A and a $33 million Series B, and both times at the negotiating table I said, 'We don't need this. Like, we can keep building, and like, I'm totally fine.' And that makes them want you a lot more. And so that's why we've gotten great terms and great valuations on both of them.
But it's true, you can't just say it and bluff. We built a good business, and I was totally fine walking away both times, which is just negotiating 101, right? You have to know that you can walk away and you'll be totally fine, and mean it. And it's led us to having great backers, great investors, and being able to do a lot of what we've done.
I'm Sammy Cohen, and this is Social Currency, a podcast that unpacks the stories that are shaping business, culture, and the intersection of the two. What's the secret behind today's fastest-growing newsletters? And how can creators build smarter, not harder? My guest today, Tyler Denk, is here to answer exactly that. Tyler was one of the first hires at Morning Brew, and he's now CEO of beehiiv, the platform that's powering some of your favorite newsletters and fueling a new wave of digital media empires. Tyler's story starts in a place that many of us can relate to: broke, ambitious, and trying to build something out of nothing. In this conversation, he shares how he went from launching side hustles with no money to building the infrastructure behind Morning Brew's explosive growth before taking everything he learned to create beehiiv. We talk about the hard truths of being a founder, why Tyler thinks that being single is a startup superpower, and how he's positioning beehiiv to dominate in a creator economy flooded with tools. Plus, we dive into the role of AI and how it will or won't play in the future of content. This is Tyler Denk, Social Currency. Tyler Denk, welcome to Social Currency.
So, you've said that you had under $5 in your bank account when you were starting at Morning Brew. So, at that time with less than $5 in your bank account, what was your five-year plan?
Definitely didn't have a five-year plan at that point. I guess to give more context, like prior to having $5 in my bank account, I went to the University of Maryland. I started a company with a bunch of my friends there, thinking that we were going to build this massively successful company. Like, I never had a plan B, which I guess is also true today. But like, his personality is very consistent all the way through. So in college we were building this company. Everyone else in the engineering school had all of these different internships at different companies, and for me I thought I was like above that. I was like, 'No, we're building this like massive company.' And so I never made money in college. So I never had an internship, never had a job. Basically funded college through student loans. So graduated with $120,000 of student debt, and then after graduating moved home with my parents and realized that that company that I thought was going to be a billion-dollar company was not a billion-dollar company, and it didn't really pay us anything up until that point. So that's where the screenshot comes from with the, I think it was 55 cents in my bank account, living in my parents' basement with $120,000 of student debt. And there was no five-year plan at that point. But I think, I mean, fortunately I had supportive parents who like allowed me to live in the basement. I had an engineering degree from the University of Maryland, and I had an entrepreneurial spirit that I wanted to build something. So that remained strong, but I would have never guessed that I would go on to do what I've done since then.
And so what was the tie to Morning Brew? So you're in your basement. How do you go from basement to, okay, job at Morning Brew?
Yeah. So one of the co-founders there is Austin Rief, and we actually grew up together in Baltimore. And so a few years previously we were in Tel Aviv. We had like an, I guess I did have like an unpaid internship for one summer in college before my startup, and we would always just talk about different business ideas. And at the time he was telling me about this like email newsletter idea, which I thought was so silly, and I was building this like tech startup that I thought was so cool. So like full circle moment, I ended up joining him eventually. But we were like on the beaches of Tel Aviv hanging out, and like we always had like a very startup-focused relationship and conversations. And when I was driving home from DC one day, I just called him to catch up, and he was so excited about the business. He just went full-time at Morning Brew, and he had all these things that he wanted to build, but they didn't have an engineer to build them. And me being this scrappy self-taught software developer, he was like, 'Hey, would you want to build something for us on contract?' And I was like, 'I have 55 cents in my bank account.' Like, he said $3,000. I said, '100%, I'm in.' Totally lied my way through that. He was like, 'Can you build this?' And the answer was absolutely not, but I can figure it out. Told him absolutely yes. Got my first $3,000 building that for him. And then he was like, 'Hey, we have so many other things that we need to build. You've already proven yourself that you can build something, even though you lied. Like, do you just want to keep building things for us?' And that's kind of how the Morning Brew story started. It was just building stuff on contract from my parents' basement.
And so you were brought on to lead growth at Morning Brew. Did you have any idea in those early days of what Morning Brew would eventually turn into, or was it really in the moment just, okay, I got $3,000 for this initial gig and I'll see what happens?
Yeah. I mean, I definitely wasn't flying blind. The benefit of working with a startup — so it was the two co-founders, they had a writer, and then I was like this guy from Maryland working remote, just like building stuff on contract. But in a startup, you don't have like user permissions and like different roles and responsibilities. Everyone's kind of doing everything. So I had access to the inbox and all of the replies and the data and the metrics as I was building all of the different stuff for them, and saw that they had this like deep passion of followers and subscribers who would respond by the thousands every morning being like, 'I can't start my day without Morning Brew. This is the greatest thing ever. I've shared it to my parents, my kids, my best friends, like they all read Morning Brew. We talk about it every morning.' So I kind of saw that fandom while I was like on contract. And that's like, I wasn't like flying blind being like, 'I'll take anyone. I'll take any job that's willing to pay me.' I knew the value of the skills that I had, but seeing kind of the fandom that they were building — and I'm a huge believer in Austin, he's been like a good friend, and then Alex is also incredibly smart. They had a really great nucleus of founders and talent, and like really just like caught lightning in a bottle with this movement of like newsletter-first, millennial-type content and news. And like I saw the potential of what they were doing pretty early on.
And so you pitch at one point this idea to the Morning Brew team about building this suite of newsletter growth tools within Morning Brew, and apparently that was shot down. So did that incident shake your confidence at all in this idea of what beehiiv would eventually become?
Yeah, it's probably worth — so we just filmed three and a half years, so I'll like fill everyone in. I joined Morning Brew kind of running like product, engineering, and growth. So self-taught developer. They didn't have a website, or they had like a very basic website. I built the website. I built a CMS, which is what the writers would use to actually create the newsletters on a day-to-day basis, before they were just copy-and-pasting into like some static document. I built like an ad management platform. So Morning Brew makes money from advertisement. So brands come to them, they get their logo and like copy in the newsletter. And at one point we had six different newsletters, three different advertisers per newsletter. So there's like 18 different ad units per week, and it was all done in like spreadsheets. So we built our own ad management platform. So long story short, we kind of built this entire bespoke ecosystem unique to Morning Brew. The writers had their own tech that we built in-house. We had our own custom website. We had our own monetization and ad network-type platform. And fast forward, Morning Brew grew extremely well. When I joined, we had about 100,000 subscribers. When we got acquired, we had about three and a half million three years later. And so we were on this rocket ship of one, like custom-built tech that worked really well, amazing content. And I also ran growth for a large part of that. So I was spending $500,000 a month on paid acquisition, which I totally taught myself. Had no idea what I was doing. Just like Austin's like, 'Spend money to help us grow faster.' And I was like, 'Sure, I'll figure that out.' And fortunately did figure it out. So Morning Brew is this incredible experience of like white space and an ability to learn new things. They trusted me entirely, and it worked extremely well, and we grew. And then towards the end I was like, 'Hey, we've built this amazing thing, and I'm like a tech software guy, and like tech is cool. It's cool building tech for the 15 people at the company, but it's a lot cooler to build for 15,000 or 15 million people.' And I think every engineer kind of wants to build things that more people touch in the world. And so amazing journey building internal tech. I kind of pitched them. I was like, 'Hey, we're getting tons of email replies from people who want to use like the referral program that we built, or that are really impressed with like the data we collect, our templates, like how everything looks, how everything works. I think this is a business in itself that other publishers or hobbyists or journalists would enjoy using the tech that we have built, because we already have the case study. Morning Brew went from 100K to three and a half million, and you can have that exact same tech that we used at Morning Brew for yourself.' So the pitch was right there. What I didn't know was like they were already having talks about getting acquired with a bunch of different companies, and here I am like this like 26-year-old self-taught developer being like, 'Hey, I know this business is great,' and I didn't know that they were in talks getting acquired, 'but I think we should pivot our entire business to be this tech business.' So like I don't fault them for being like, 'Hey, I don't think that's like the right thing to do.' And I had no way of knowing that they were going through these acquisition talks. So I didn't take it personally that it's a bad idea. I always had a ton of conviction that there was real value there. Otherwise, I don't think Morning Brew would have been what Morning Brew is.
And I read that you actually left Morning Brew a short period of time before the acquisition happened. Had you known that the acquisition was in the works, would you have stayed?
No. And so that was like totally coincidental and actually I think worked out in my favor. So I don't know how well people understand — and every acquisition is very different, right? But typically when a company gets acquired, there's like some rollover responsibility. The new company who acquired you doesn't want to like pay you out and then everyone leaves. So they have a lot of incentives where if you hit different revenue milestones or people stay for one — the key people stay for one, two, three years, you get paid out more. So they kind of give you like the golden handcuffs to stay in the new company. So the company who just spent, you know, $100 million, whatever it is, to buy the company doesn't have anyone leave and it kind of go to — so had I stayed, I'm assuming I would have had to stay at Business Insider for another two to three years to kind of earn out like the equity and everything. And again, like I wasn't involved in those conversations. So it's all hypothetical of like what my responsibility would have been, but I obviously left because I did my three and a half years there. I'm like forever thankful. It was an amazing experience. But I kind of hit like the end of my journey there. And I think if I was told that, 'Hey, we just got acquired, but for me to like really earn out like the equity and money that I deserve, I'd have to stay another two to three years,' it would have been a pretty depressing two to three years for me, I think. So I'm happy it worked out the way that it did.
And I'm curious to hear about a core memory that you have from your time at Morning Brew that really shaped your experience or perhaps thought process on building out beehiiv.
We would set the newsletter every night. So the newsletter goes out like I think 6:00 a.m. Eastern time every morning. We typically set it at night between 8 or 9:00. But we were in New York. We're like networking, we go to events, like every now and then clients like take us out. We had a happy hour. So like we would be invited to go see like the Rangers game, or we'd go to like a happy hour that turned into like a late night at a club, but like that newsletter still had to get set. And we were like a small scrappy team, and it's not like we've delegated. It's like the most important thing you can do is make sure it goes out perfectly the next morning. So we'd always have our backpacks on us, and like we'd literally be at like a club in like Lower East Side at like 3:00 a.m. and I'd pull out my laptop and we'd like run through tests as we're like drunk, making sure everything looks good and like set the newsletter. And it's like that level of like it just has to get done and there's no one else to do it and like we're the ones in charge here. I think we have a photo album somewhere of like the most ridiculous places that we were like setting the newsletter from, like the nicest like Michelin-star restaurants to like clubs to like the Rangers game. Literally like snuck our laptop in so we could set that during like a hockey game. But there's something about like that fun startup grind which is so anti-corporate or like what you would expect at like a big media company. Like they would never allow that, or like nor would anyone give a [__] enough to like go through like the embarrassment to even do that stuff. So that's like, I don't know, a pretty core memory for me.
That's a good one. So we mentioned you eventually leaving Morning Brew, and when you left Morning Brew, you went to YouTube. And at that time you were moonlighting. You were working on beehiiv early stages after work on the weekends. So tell me more about the very early stages of building beehiiv.
Yeah, YouTube's like a black hole for me. Like it was such a weird time. So I left Morning Brew in the fall of 2020. So like we had already kind of gone remote because of COVID. And so I was like living in Williamsburg, working on Morning Brew, kind of like on my way out of Morning Brew. My roommate worked at Google, and I love music. I have like my Big Desk Energy playlist. Like I'm like a huge music person. He found this role for YouTube Music, and I was like already kind of like on the way out with Morning Brew and applied and got the job. And it also was like a — which I knew going into it was a totally different pace. It was me sending the newsletter at 2 a.m. because someone had to do it in like a Lower East Side bar, to having so many layers of management above me that nothing ever really got done. And like the work that I was actually assigned, I finished at 10, 11 a.m. every morning, and it was just like a totally different pace. Which I'm not naive, and I kind of expected that, but I kind of wanted to see what big tech was about and see if there's anything that I could extract. I never had like a real job with like real instruction and best practices, and Google's like kind of like the best of the best of like product management. And so I felt that I could learn something from going through that experience, and I did. I actually learned a lot of like what a PRD is, how to scope things with engineers, how to like do this like full product cycle, like that we were flying totally blind at Morning Brew and it worked out. But everything that I learned at Google, I have applied at beehiiv. It was 10 months that is kind of a black hole in my memory, but a good 10 months. But that kind of like sets the stage of I was in this Williamsburg apartment working at this company that I was kind of done with work at like 11:00, noon every day. And before even joining, I had a week in between jobs that I actually got COVID. So I was like stranded in my apartment, couldn't travel, couldn't do anything. And I caught up with my now co-founder, but co-worker, the first person I ever hired at Morning Brew, Ben, who's like a software engineer. And like again, we're like in the trenches at Morning Brew, always talking about how cool would it be if we could build this for so many more than like the 30 employees at this company. And I told him, I was like, 'Hey, I have COVID, I'm so bored. I have like nothing to do. But I actually think that idea we had about like kind of productizing Morning Brew has like a ton of legs. And you know, we've just spent three and a half years building it.' He's like, 'Dude, it's a lot of work, and like just doing that again but better but for everyone, like huge uphill battle.' And he's like, 'If we're going to do it, we have to bring my good friend Jake, who's like our third co-founder.' And I was like, 'Sure, let's do it.' And so from that point on, I kind of — so literally from before I started day one of YouTube, we had already kind of planted the seeds of like let's meet every week and start writing out the roadmap and figuring out how we're going to build this thing. Meanwhile they were both at Morning Brew, I was at Google, and we just worked nights and weekends kind of building this thing. And that was like probably the most stressful 10 months because you're building this thing that is no guarantee of success, right? Like it's a very competitive industry, and we had like a very slim wedge of what we think we could do well. And at any moment I thought I could wake up and any of the competitors could have launched something that made our wedge like totally useless, right?
And so there's that anxiety of like, are we spending all of our time and like waking hours on something that could be like totally useless if one company launches one feature? So that was scary.
And then it's like it's all self-imposed deadlines. And like my co-founders, both of them are married, but one like just recently got married. They have a full-time, more demanding job at Morning Brew than me at Google. I'm like, 'Hey, we have to launch this. Hey, we have to do this.' And they're like, 'Hey, we're on vacation in Costa Rica right now.' I'm like, 'I know, but like I see this opportunity. I don't want to waste this.' It's like very stressful and strainful on the relationship to push people so hard when we're not getting paid for it. There's no guarantee of anything. There's no guarantee we even get this off the ground and do anything with it. Because like I feel like everyone can relate to having this like one idea where like, 'Oh [__], we have to do that.' Like it comes and goes and it fades, and like most ideas do. And this was just one that I didn't want to let go. But very stressful 10 months, I'd say.
And you mentioned that none of you were paying yourselves because you hadn't raised capital, but you did raise a seed round of funding before you went all-in. So who were your initial investors?
Yeah. So everyone always thinks that founders and entrepreneurs are so risk-tolerant. I think, I mean, we are, but we de-risked this as much as we possibly could. Like they again were both married. I made a little bit of money from the Morning Brew acquisition, but like by no means like super comfortable, like could fund a full business by myself. And so we never wanted to be in a position where we would start the company and just work for free. It's like the whole like ramen diet that I think is like a terrible idea for founders. I was like, we don't have to pay ourselves a lot, but we should be able to like go to the grocery store and pay rent and like be able to focus on the business, not have to focus on where's money coming from, like worry about personal finances. And so in July I came to LA with a bunch of friends, and like my goal for July — this is 10 months after starting building — is let's try to raise a seed round. We had like a kind of working prototype. We had the backstory of three co-founders who were all Morning Brew engineers. We had the success of the Morning Brew acquisition. So like that is the case study. And then we had a waitlist. I like tweeted like, 'Hey, I'm like building this thing.' This is the first time I announced it. I was like, 'We're building this thing.' It's kind of — Substack had just started to take off and get very popular at the time. Twitter acquired Rev. Facebook launched Bulletin, which was like their newsletter initiative. So newsletters were like very hot all of a sudden. And I was like, 'Hey, it's the Morning Brew team. We just built this. Let me know if you're interested.' And we got like 400 people to put their email and information in this waitlist. So I spent all July in LA just trying to network and raise a seed round. And so we got connected with Howard Lindzon of Social Leverage, was like the first check-in essentially. It was a $2.5 million seed round. I think they put in like one, one and a half of that. They're based in San Diego. And so I was like, mission successful. I came to LA in July, met them in San Diego. We like did the deal at the end of July, early September. And as soon as the money hit the bank, we all quit our jobs and did that. So it was like a full de-risking with like no interruption from like having some sort of income, which was like really nice.
I think you bring up a good point around this push and pull of risk aversion as a founder versus the trope of the founder who just leaves his job and jumps all in and worries about funding later. But I think most of the time when you hear someone who is launching a company, what you don't see behind the scenes is that there is more financial backing or protection than the headline suggests. Either they have supportive parents and they're able to hang out at their parents' house while they build, or they're able to, you know, have a full-time job and build it on the side. So I think when people hear your story, it's — I like the fact that you're calling out that you actually did try and hedge a bit.
Well, I think being a founder is so much harder than I would have ever expected. It's the hardest thing I've ever done, and it's not even close. And I think when you realize that you have to put all of your time, effort, and focus into like building the company, figuring out like, 'Oh, am I budgeting okay so I can like get this like nicer apartment so I can have a little bit of space because we're all remote?' Like you kind of don't want to be focusing on personal finances. And we never paid ourselves amazing, but we paid ourselves enough where like personal finances were fine, right? And like I think that's actually — it goes counter to like the whole ramen diet, like we're hustling, like we're not paying ourselves, because like a lot of founders try to prove themselves, like 'I'm so committed to this and I can tell investors I'm not even paying myself, like that's how committed I am.' And I feel like that is just a fallacy of you're just setting yourself up to like burn out, or you're like incredibly fortunate, either have a lot of capital or like come from a wealthy family, and there's somewhere in between on that spectrum. But I just think you're creating disadvantages that don't need to exist when your time and effort should be focused on just building the company.
Yeah. I want to transition a bit to a little bit further on down the stage of building beehiiv, but I first want to ask you about the name beehiiv. Is there an origin story, and also the spelling? How did you land on the spelling?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it'll say a lot about my personality because there's not much of an origin story. When we had this like desire of, 'Here's the vision, I want to build this,' I'm very OCD where like you need some foundation to build on, like you need a name, you need a color, you need something. And I was like, 'Let's just get a name out there.' And I spent maybe an hour thinking of like different names. The name of like having a hive of followers, beehiiv, like came up. Of course, beehiiv spelled correctly was like not available for a domain. So like as any other startup founder does, you just test like 20 different variations of it. We found one with totally incorrect spelling, but close enough where we can figure out what it is. It was available for $10. We bought it and we started building. And it's one of those things that I have a few like strong takes on building a company. I think if you have an amazing product, like you can overlook — like you don't have to have like the perfect branding and name. I think product speaks louder than that. I think if I would have had a month to do nothing but think of like the perfect name and branding and everything, I don't think beehiiv is where I would have landed. But it's also I think speaks to like what I value or what I think is most important, which is like that was an hour exercise and then we just went heads down and started building, and we haven't stopped building from that moment. And like I think that's totally fine and it's like responsible for like a lot of the reason that we are where we are today.
And to confirm, no connection to Beyoncé?
No. I did go to her concert a few months ago in LA and it was fantastic, but like no, no, no relation yet.
You just held up the beehiiv sign with your spelling and you thought it was for her. I felt the concept was for me. So, how did you get your first 100 users? You already said that you had a waitlist of 400 people. Now, when you were converting those people from the waitlist to actual users, was there a strategy or a growth hack that worked really well for you early on?
Funny enough, you bring that up. I haven't thought about the waitlist in such a long time. And someone who I reached out to on that waitlist emailed me back four years later, like literally a month ago. And like the timestamp from 2021 till like last week was crazy.
They're like, 'Hey, I know it's been a while, but I think I'm ready to come around and join the platform.' I was like, 'Bro, we needed you three years ago.' But yeah, we had that list of like 400 people. I know it's like free to put in your name and information. And we collect a little bit of information, like what platform are you using now? How big is your list? Like what's your biggest pain point? It was kind of like information gathering, almost like a business school, just like what are the pain points, like who can we serve? Once we launched, we reached out to all of them, just like little, nothing fancy. No, I mean now we have like AI automations and everything. Back then I was in Gmail bccing and like emailing one by one all 400 people with like a little talk track, like, 'Hey, we just launched this, giving it away for free,' or like, I don't know. It's like we were so underpriced for like the longest time and still are very, very competitively priced. So if they are using like Mailchimp, like, 'Hey, we'd save you 60% of your monthly cost. It's a new unproven product, but like I'll hold your hand every step of the way through.' And so we got, I think it was maybe like a 25% conversion. So that actually like about 100 people moved in. That was just like every week it was who else can we reach out to on that list to move them over. The other thing that we did for our first hundred users is when we raised that seed round, so Howard Lindzon and Social Leverage put in like their million whatever, we had about 500k reserved for like angel investors. And the angel investors were all very strategic, as in they already had an email list or were in media or like kind of were our ideal users. So like the easiest way to get users are like they invested in the company and they have this shared success or like shared incentive to want us to succeed. So we have about 30 to 35 strategic angel investors. I think about 10 to 15 of them moved over as well. And they all had more reputation and like a larger list that helped in the early days as well.
And so obviously these were strategics. Was there a specific creator or publication that maybe wasn't part of that initial angel group that signed on perhaps in the earlier days of beehiiv that gave you this feeling that beehiiv was really going to turn into something?
Sure. The one that comes to mind actually was an investor. So Liquidity, the meme account.
He wrote a check into the company, and the reason why he stands out is like he actually had like a 100,000-person list. And like we've been hacking together this like tiny like side project, like it is not meant for the big leagues. I'm still embarrassed by the product because I'm such a perfectionist. Like I feel like there's so much more that we can do to improve what we have today. So three and a half years ago this thing is like embarrassing. And I always respect him a ton because no hesitation, like 100 — he has like a full business built on his email list. He's driving like north of a million dollars of revenue from his 100,000-person email list. And no hesitation, he goes, 'Yeah, I'll move over if it'll help you guys.' And like moved 100,000 emails over at the time where we were — prior to that, we were probably sending 10,000 emails a day total between all of our users. And he like 10x'd that just himself. And it didn't break. So that was like the first time I was like, 'Oh, we can actually handle that.' And like it — and he's never complained once, and like now the product's great. But yeah, I think him buying in and believing in us and like it not breaking the entire platform was like a huge sense of relief. Yeah.
And when beehiiv launched, and this is very much still the case today, but it was back then as well, there were several incumbents and successful incumbents in the market. So what gave you the conviction that there was still white space there?
Yeah. A few different things. I'd say what I classify as like email 1.0, which is like Constant Contact, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, like pure email platforms that have been around for 15, 20 years. They just send email. Like their product is like, 'Hey, you go to us and you send,' and it's typically like marketing email as well, but they send email. There's a whole other component which beehiiv does and Morning Brew did as well, like we have like the whole website and blog. Like at Morning Brew, the problem we were solving was we had this custom WordPress website and we would copy and paste the content that we post on the WordPress website into Mailchimp. So it's two different systems. And then if you want like a referral program, it's a whole other system. And then if you want audience development and engagement, like that's another like dashboard that you need to build. And then if you want to monetize and you don't have your own ad sales team, you use like LiveIntent or like these different banner ads. And so that was like the old paradigm of how media companies kind of like handled email newsletters. It was like five or six different components, and a lot of media companies and journalists don't have a ton of like engineering and tech talent. So piecing them together is like a total pain in the ass. And so what we did at Morning Brew is like we built our own solution that had all of that in like one tightly integrated system, and it worked really well. And when you look at the market, with the exception of Substack who did something similar — Substack bundled email, website, and paid subscriptions under one — and there's a reason why I think us and Substack are kind of jumping out and like having the success that we're having. But that bundling of platforms like didn't really exist. And so there's all of email 1.0, which like hasn't been updated in forever, just sends email. There's like website builders that don't really do email, right? So this is like two different systems again. And then there was the vision that we had for beehiiv, which is what if we bundled email, website, growth tools, and monetization? So again, the Morning Brew package that we know works because it has worked for us, and built into a platform that anyone could use. I just thought that that value prop was strong enough that we would be able to win people over, and the results kind of — they prove themselves, right? When you move over and you grow faster on our platform, when you had some like janky process copy-and-pasting between your old website and like your email, and now it's like your editor can do everything in one platform and you're making money from our ad network, like the results kind of speak for themselves. And that was kind of like the vision that we've always had from the beginning.
So for someone who wants to start a newsletter and they're starting from zero followers and they're trying to figure out how they should grow this thing and build their community, what would your advice for them be?
Yeah, I think being open to experimentation because it is such a low-cost commitment. You don't have to quit your day job and go all in on this newsletter business. You can do something that you're passionate about. So if you're passionate about sports, if you're passionate about the WNBA, start writing about the WNBA and send it to people who are also interested in that. And I think like not trying to over-index on paid acquisition and just focusing on like do people enjoy this and would they share it for free is a great sign that you have something that other people are interested in. And I think the willingness to experiment, to try different formats, to try different acquisition strategies — like fortunately platforms like beehiiv and others make it so easy and like free to get started. I just think it's like a great opportunity to be able to like test and experiment and not tie yourself down to like one specific product or approach or business model.
And you had mentioned your newsletter, Big Desk Energy. Fantastic name.
What were some initial growth tactics that you used in order to scale your newsletter?
Yeah, so Big Desk Energy started as a Spotify playlist actually way back in the Morning Brew days. So I listen to music all day when I work. Found an amazing song, created a playlist around it, and then Morning Brew put it in the newsletter and it got 5,000 followers on Spotify. Now we're up to 20,000. So it's a little side project of mine, built a website, eventually launched the newsletter. I always — obviously building beehiiv, that was actually going to be the name of the newsletter is Building beehiiv. I always kind of wanted to document the story and the narrative of like what we're actually doing behind the scenes because it's the type of content that I'm interested in, is like startup stories and founder journeys and like everything of the sort. And there's not a ton of content. There's a lot of startup content, but it either comes from a place of 'I already sold my business, this is what I did five years ago,' which is like less applicable, and you kind of already know how the story plays out. It's almost like a drama. Like when I share what we're building in real time, it's like you have no idea how this is going to turn out. Like I think this is a good idea, it could be a terrible idea, and like we'll find out in like a few months to come, right? And so it's like interesting documenting the journey almost like a journal as I'm doing it, and I've always wanted to do that from like literally day one of building the company. Turns out when you start the company it's like very stressful and like there's not enough time to like carve out three hours to write this newsletter every week. You're putting out fires, and like every newsletter would scare investors away knowing how many fires there are that are going on. So never launched it up until last November. I finally — I think the holidays tricked me, like the time slowed down a little bit, it was like less hectic, and I was like, 'Oh, I think I have time to do this now.' So I launched Big Desk Energy, and the way that I initially started it was fortunately I had like 15,000 followers on Twitter, nothing gigantic, but I was like, 'Hey, I'm going to launch a newsletter. I'm not launching it till I have a thousand subscribers.' So I kind of like put it on people to subscribe, like, 'Hey, please like share this. Like I'm not sending anything till we have a thousand.' Also just like a time and effort thing, like I didn't want to write a whole like five — I'm a very slow writer. I didn't want to write for five hours to have like four people read this thing. So that was like the first thing I did. But then there's like a lot of strategies that like anyone could take advantage of. So I post on social the night before. So I publish the newsletter every Tuesday, and every Monday on Instagram, on X, and on LinkedIn, I say, 'Here's what I'm writing about. Sign up here. It'll be in your inbox tomorrow.' Free acquisition. I get like nothing major, 15 to 20 subscribers just by like kind of previewing what I'm going to write about. Then on Tuesday I publish it. Same thing, but it's like a different angle and it's kind of like a lead magnet. So it's like, 'Today I shared how we hit 20 million ARR. Read about it here.' And you click through, and beehiiv has a feature where you can put like an email gate up. So like no one can read unless they put in their email. So you have — it's almost like clickbait, right? You get people drawn in from like this headline, they click, they want to read it, they have to put in their email. It's like another 20, 30 subscribers. And then there's like a bunch of other things. So the thing that people always want with newsletters is like they want like that silver bullet of like this is how I get to a million subscribers next month. The thing is like I do 20 things that all add like 15 subscribers a day, but it compounds over time. And so like a referral program, I have like a merch shop that you can get like 30% off if you share the newsletter. I do lead magnets. So I'm very transparent about the journey. And so I've created like the Series Seed deck that we had where we raised the two and a half million. Super useful for other founders who are thinking about raising money. I'm like, 'Hey, if you put in your email here, I'll email you the seed deck.' And so I like run ads for that as well. Just like a bunch of different things, but I've documented all of this. I'm like very open about how I'm growing, and like most of it is all through the beehiiv platform anyway. The only like extra bit is like paid acquisition, which I think any newsletter who really tries to hit scale has to eventually put like some money behind it for Facebook or Instagram ads traditionally. But yeah, we're at 110,000 subscribers and it's good.
I love — I'm personally subscribed to Big Desk Energy, and I love what you said around when you're building something live, right? Sometimes you'll just throw out these crazy ideas of like, 'Hey, we're going to try doing this' or 'We're going to ship this product,' and sometimes it doesn't work the way that you had envisioned, but that actually makes for better content, honestly, because people — this is what I tell people all the time. People get tired of the success stories. The success stories are fun every once in a while, but what people actually want to see a lot of the time, especially from the founder angle, is what it's like in the trenches and what's not working.
It's by far the — the newsletters that I get the most responses to are the ones where I'm the most vulnerable, of like, 'I was so convinced that this was going to work and it totally didn't and it [__] up everything for a while.' And people are like, 'That's like really refreshing to hear.' Like I've done like some pretty personal — there's like been very dark times throughout this journey. And like being — we're totally remote, so we have 100 employees located around the world. I think we have like three people in LA, all different parts of LA. People don't drive in LA, too many people drive in LA, so no one drives in LA. So like I'm in my room 16 hours a day, five to six days a week I'd say. And like there are times when like the company's crushing and I feel like I'm on top of the world and like I just live off that energy. And there's times where you go through like two or three bad weeks, like a bad launch, big user churn, someone you thought you were going to hire ends up like pulling back on their offer.
There's like problem after problem after problem and you're just in your room by yourself isolated for 16 hours. Like there's definitely been some like pretty dark and depressing days throughout the journey. And I'm like pretty open about it. And like I think there's times where my best newsletters I've ever written have been so raw and in the moment of like no filter. Like I feel like I want to express myself. I open up like an Apple Notepad and just like write, not try, don't care about grammar or anything. And like those get the best feedback by far. Um, and it's not forced, like there's no, I'm not, it's not performative and I'm not trying to like force any sort of like hardship or founder journey. And I think that's why people have resonated with the newsletter, just like real stories. And it's usually good, but there's definitely been some bad times and I've shared them.
And I think that's actually a good takeaway for anyone who's listening who's either writing their own newsletter or thinking about it. And probably this applies to just content creation more generally of just sharing the moments where things aren't going right because that's generally what people respond the most to. I think especially when you're like a venture-backed startup,
