How Beehiiv Is Helping Creators Monetize Faster Than Ever with CEO Tyler Denk

We listen to our users and truly lean into what they want. Like our product velocity is second to none. We build features, we ship features very quickly.

Every user cares about two things. They want to grow faster and they want to make more money. And if you can build products and tech that enable that, typically users and especially creators are very happy.

And now anyone without any technical background and without more than 10, 15 minutes of time can build an incredible website.

We now have 3 billion emails going through the platform every single month. And we're just the matchmaker, the platform. Every week you get new advertisement opportunities. You don't know anyone at AG1 and you don't need to. You can actually make money from day one with like a 10-person list.

I think the superpower of having the CEO actually using the product on like a day-to-day basis, like things get prioritized, they get fixed, and I think that shows in like the quality of product that we've been able to ship.

Yeah, I think the reason why we use that language is actually pretty intentional because when you look at the users that we've served really well, we have on one side what you typically consider a creator, which is the Cody Sanchezes, the Hank Greens of the world, like typical content creators, but we also serve Time, Newsweek, The Ringer, Texas Tribune, like very, very large publishers. And it's not even that we serve one better than the other. We serve both extremely well. And so, like, what's the thing that actually ties them both together? And that they've built these content-based businesses. And so like the content economy, which we're trademarking, is like this new terminology we're using to actually make it a bit more abstract as to these are people and organizations and publishers who are capable of creating great content, cultivating an audience and being able to monetize and build a full business around that. And so us kind of positioning ourselves not just a newsletter company and not just a creator economy company, but really the operating system for the content economy, I think is a much broader stance and actually more accurately represent the products and capabilities that we offer.

Yeah, I mean I think something that we do better than anyone else is we listen to our users and truly lean into what they want. And I think you can see that from our reputation in market historically is like our product velocity is second to none. We build features, we ship features very quickly. And if you look through history at all of our product launches, you see in the replies and comments of everyone being like, 'Oh, I've been waiting on this forever. Like, this is exactly what I've been looking for.' And I've seen so many other tech companies miss the mark with launches time and time again. And I think part of that, and I think we'll maybe get to this later, with my own personal newsletter. I think about a third of our company actually has a personal newsletter as like a side project. So, they are the users. I am our end user. A lot coming from the Morning Brew background of being the second employee of Morning Brew, like I kind of know what it takes to scale a newsletter. So, that's all to say, we've always been very in tune with what our users want. And as we've launched features, we acquired a website builder last year. We launched this website builder native to our product in July of this year. And the goalposts always move, right? Like first people just wanted a better website builder. Then we acquired one and built one and they're like, 'Oh, now we want digital products. Now AI is super cool. Now, I want all of these other things because if you're going to own my website, which is where all my traffic comes, I want to be able to make money. I want to be able to build a better-looking website. I want to have opportunities to engage with my audience.' So, it really is just like a very gradual process of we launch the thing that we hear the most. And that always just moves the goalpost into like, oh, we also want these things, which kind of led us to yesterday and what we launched.

Yeah, I don't know if it's such a gap because in the sense that yes, there's a lot of other competitors in the market that also offer selling ebooks and templates and courses and guides. One gap is most of them operate in a take rate model and I think our ethos is really just putting users, creators, publishers first and I think the take rate model in a lot of senses are very predatory where we have like a standard flat rate SaaS model that I think is more predictable and better and more like creator friendly. So, we don't take a take rate on paid subscriptions, which is, you know, as opposed to Substack and others in the newsletter space. And then a lot of the digital product providers do take a decently high take rate. So, I think just being on the ethos of like what we stand for, we think we can build best-in-class products and not have a take rate from like the revenue and steal that from our users. But, it's less so of like the gap of what others were providing or lack of providing, more so we already owned their website and we owned their newsletter. And so now they were stuck between, from the perspective of a user, multiple logins. Do I send my audience to XYZ platform to buy digital products from me, but I'm also sending a newsletter over here and actually my website's over here. And so it's like really just like a convoluted experience for the readers and for the content creator. So this bundling of being able to provide really great tech in a single platform, my bet is that the convenience and the quality of products of having everything bundled together is better for the content creator and publisher and better for the audience to have a consistent experience and so just kind of this natural evolution of consolidation across the ecosystem.

Yeah, so started with digital products. That's like a big one for us because I think my biggest hypothesis of how we can best serve our users is every user cares about two things. They want to grow faster and they want to make more money. And if you can build products and tech that enable that, typically users and especially creators are very happy. Digital products is something we've heard time and time again. We have this like emerging middle class of content creators on the platform who have a subject matter expertise in crypto, AI, sports, whatever, and they have this loyal fan base. And if you can take your expertise and monetize it with ebooks, guides or booking time, it's just yet another monetization stream for these content creators and publishers. So, that's very exciting to us. Obviously AI is exploding in popularity and finding different use cases for different products. There's been this like vibe coding movement over the past like 12 to 18 months where previously if you back up a decade, like very high barrier to entry, very high friction to build a website because you needed either technical skills, you needed to learn yourself how to code or you had to like hire someone to build this website for you. Then there was like this movement of an introduction of these website builders which are like drag and drop. They help, they're very templated and that's kind of like the paradigm that we were in previously. And then the most recent paradigm is just describe what you want with English or even take a screenshot of your favorite website and add it in and tweak it how you want. And now anyone without any technical background and without more than 10, 15 minutes of time can build an incredible website. And so again, it's really just listening to users and like yes we acquired this website builder. They actually had an AI native website feature as well. Can we just take that and what the market is dictating is like drag and drop takes two hours. I just want to describe in two minutes. And so that's kind of like how we were thinking about that. So the digital products and AI is great. And then I mean I could keep going down the list cuz we launched so many things, but like podcasts are just an extension of like our core consumer and user also has a podcast in many cases. And so where do you send your audience to listen to that podcast? Is it Apple? Is it Spotify? We basically built like a pod page where it centralizes all of your podcast episodes. And then website analytics are great because most people actually don't feel like going through the Google Analytics, adding a JavaScript pixel, troubleshooting it, logging in, building these funnels. We just do that for you and now you have full transparency into your website analytics. So yeah, that's kind of like some of the things that we've been launching and yeah.