Beehiiv’s CEO Breaks Down His Exact Newsletter Growth Playbook

Thanks for having me.

I'd call it a newsletter. It actually might bring in more revenue than my full-time job, which is funny. And I guess like the power of newsletters. But yeah, my investor actually just pinged me an hour ago saying, "Hey, your most recent BDE issue was incredible. I forget that you actually have like a full-time job to do in addition to this." So it's definitely one of the more stressful things I do, just balancing time. And I'm happy to get into one, how I've grown it, the strategy, and like there's a lot of reasoning behind it.

Yeah, so I usually spend my weekends writing it. In an ideal world, I have this running list of different topics that I think are interesting that I'd like to eventually write about. In an ideal world, by Thursday, I write like a rough first draft that I can just keep going back and iterating. And I spend most of like Saturday and Sunday finalizing it. I'd say all in all, it's probably about a five to seven hour a week initiative to build this newsletter. So I've definitely forfeited a lot of weekends in doing it, but I think the upside's been really incredible.

Publish it every Tuesday. Every Tuesday.

Yeah. So I guess it's worth taking a step back and kind of giving a bit more context of I guess what I have built in the content lens. And so when I first launched beehiiv or even before launching beehiiv and it was just a side project on nights and weekends, I had maybe 5,000 followers on Twitter, maybe 10,000 on LinkedIn. So by no means was I a large content creator in trying to scale and reach a wider audience of people who I think would be interested in what I'm building. One way to view it is like you have taken a very particular niche which is mostly email newsletters and tangential topics. I debated going into that and being like the newsletter guy obviously for beehiiv and like what we're building that'd be very relevant but just widening the aperture. I figured if I could just write about building in public whether it is how we hire, how we run meetings, how we scale the company, different milestones, different attributes and traits that we look for in different employees and hires. It kind of widens the aperture of people who would be interested in this content. Not just people who could be our customers, but anyone who has a small business or startup who is interested in the stories and tactics to actually scale that company. And so, dating back to 2020 is when we started building beehiiv. And the thesis was simple. I'm just going to post as much as I could on LinkedIn and X about what features we're building, why it's valuable, why users should care, which built this kind of like transparent build-in-public persona of people look to me as who understand exactly who we are as a business and what we're prioritizing because I'm very transparent about all of that. And so I did that for the first three years while building the company. And then the newsletter was really just kind of an evolution of that. It allows me to go much deeper than a 280 character tweet to have a 1500-word essay that I send every week. And so the premise of Big Desk Energy really is the behind-the-scenes tactics and stories as we're building the company with the hope that it inspires and helps other founders and entrepreneurs to launch their own companies.

Yeah, I think this was actually the topic of my newsletter today, so it's very timely, but the power of founder marketing. How I broke it down was I think we're entering this world now where distribution is the real bottleneck in the sense that SEO has been very professionalized. Paid spend on Google and Meta is very expensive and more competitive than ever. And that's why you're seeing all these companies invest in their own content marketing and telling stories. And that's like the whole rise of like the Wall Street Journal article that went viral of tech companies hiring storytellers for $200,000 plus dollars which got mocked on X and whatever. It really is just like the shift from we can't just pay for distribution and we can't rely on Google because of AI and everything for distribution. So storytelling narratives is just a new lever that a lot of companies are leaning into. And I think it follows the thesis that people want to follow people more so than features and faceless brands. And so while most people probably couldn't name or identify the founders behind Mailchimp or any of these other like large ESPs that we compete with, I do think there's an inherent competitive advantage in being a face of a company that's very transparent about what's working, what's not working, what we're prioritizing, and show that we really do care as a company. And so yeah, this founder-led marketing thing I think has helped one, beehiiv become a larger, more notable company, not just for the features and software that we offer, but because of the story and the narrative and the persona of I guess me and the company and the characters that I built around it. And then trust is really like one of the biggest scarcities today. And when we've entered this world of AI, almost anyone can vibe code these different software platforms. So these platforms are being launched more quickly than ever before and content has been commoditized because anyone with the access to the internet can use ChatGPT to create all of this content. Then naturally what value skews to is trust and that's people that you can relate to or that you've seen provide value time and time again. And so I think we're just seeing this macro shift towards that given AI and everything else that's happening. Yeah, this founder-led persona has helped a ton in trying to grow the company.

Yeah, it was just about exactly two years ago. So, January of 2024 was the first issue.

Zero to a thousand. Yes. But it's not like the most replicable. I basically announced it in December and said once I get a thousand subscribers I will send my first issue of Big Desk Energy, which happened. Like I basically just kept promoting that every few days on X and LinkedIn and then launched it in January when I got my first thousand. The very gritty tactics that actually got me from like let's say a thousand to 10,000 beyond just like creating a waitlist was the night before. So I send every Tuesday so every Monday I would preview what I'm going to write about the following day. I think you've done this really well as well, but basically showcasing, hey, this is a topic that I'm writing about. If you want to be the first to find out about it, subscribe here. That would always trickle in a few dozen subscribers across different platforms every Monday night. And then Tuesday, I send the newsletter. I would synthesize what I just wrote and then post kind of like a summary that left out some key details. So, if it was like the five things that we look for when we hire a new employee at beehiiv, I would list on Tuesday three of them and then say for the last two, click here to sign up to the newsletter. And then every post, which is a feature that comes out of the box on beehiiv, is just an email gate, which sounds very simple, but there's basically a few different ways you can collect emails on these different posts. As you're scrolling, everyone is familiar with like the pop-up box, which is super annoying, and you can just exit out and continue reading the content. A more restrictive way is the email gate, which basically lets you read like the first few sentences, but you actually can't get past it without putting in your email. So, as I'm promoting the content that I'm creating, I'm constantly driving traffic back to the post that I just sent. And if they're willing and interested enough to click on X and LinkedIn, this preview of what I'm writing, the likelihood that they also put in their email to read the rest of the content is very high. And so, all of my posts have an email gate on it. So those are like a few of the early tactics in terms of like the social hype the night before, the recapping the day after, using an email gate on all the different posts, and then the referral program, something I've always had from day one and one of the first projects I ever built at Morning Brew previous to building beehiiv was the referral program. And you of course that sit very close to the newsletter ecosystem. Like I think they have become a bit less effective and a bit sad over time but that was like the killer growth lever for Morning Brew at the time between 2017 and 2020. And so every newsletter on beehiiv has the ability to launch their own referral program. And so I've had one that has led to a few thousand subscribers as well.

Like 120.

Yeah. That in the early days I think every newsletter at scale does paid acquisition. I think that to like be able to break through and actually really scale a newsletter to beyond 50, 75,000 like you do need to put some capital into it. But the early days when I was solely dependent on these different like gritty tactics like posting every Monday and Tuesday about the newsletter, the referral program as you mentioned very on autopilot. Recommendations is like another feature I use at beehiiv. I probably have grown 5 to 10,000 subscribers through recommendations through the platform. I think the big thing that everyone wants to know is how can I scale my list as quickly as humanly possible? And I think anyone who's been around the game long enough knows that there isn't ever a single silver bullet to do that. It really is the compounding effect of posting the night before gets you a few dozen. Posting the day of gets you a few dozen. The recommendations will get you a few dozen a week. The referral program will get you an incremental few dozen. And then, you know, as you get better at posting your content and trying a few of these different strategies, one hits every now and then. And then once you add paid later in your journey, that's really like the accelerator where the few dozen you were getting on the recommendations or referral program turns into a few hundred at scale. I think that's my long-winded way of saying there isn't really a silver bullet that I've seen unless you go crazy viral and are able to plug something that is like in that peak virality moment. Otherwise, it's really like this steady grind of 10 to 15 strategies that all get you a few subscribers that start to compound over time.

I have one in my back pocket. I recorded something last week and I have the video. I just haven't set up whether it's like ManyChat or one of those platforms to like be able to do the whole like automation stuff. But yeah, I'm going to give it a try probably later this week or next week and see if it works.

Yeah. I mean, another thing that I do which is fairly gritty, offset some of the grit by hiring someone to help me do this. But as part of onboarding, users give us their or typically users will upload their social channels. And me trying to be this public CEO that really engages with our users, which I think is like our core competitive advantage, is one that I am a user and two that I'm constantly speaking to our users. So I have a really good finger on the pulse of what features we should be building. One way that I do that is I collect everyone's X and LinkedIn and I connect with them. And so I have a VA that sends a LinkedIn request, which I've maxed out now, but an X request to follow every single new user on the platform. And then I also have them send a note to sign up to my newsletter. The hope is from the user perspective, they're like, "Wow, that's really cool that the CEO of this company that I just signed up for cares enough to connect with me on social." So it's kind of like a growth hack for the platform. And then I try to go one step further because my newsletter is all about building in public and sharing what we're building at beehiiv. If I can get them to click on the link and sign up, now I just have that much deeper of a relationship with them where they're now receiving my weekly newsletter and they're more bought into the vision of what we're building and have a deeper connection with me personally, which ideally leads to like more engaged readers on the newsletter front, but a more loyal user hopefully on the beehiiv front.

Yeah. And I think just being that much more memorable and making people feel like you care because even though you're not doing it manually, like you still care enough to set this up and pay people to do it and like you follow when they send you messages like you're actually responding to them. I'm like not super active on Instagram. I'm still like old school on Instagram where I post like one photo every like 3 months essentially. But those who have leaned more into Instagram and like Reels obviously now that it's more algorithm-driven and people are routinely posting videos and using Instagram as kind of a growth channel which I haven't done. There's a lot of automations you can set up with like ManyChat and a few of these other platforms where every time you get a new follower it'll automatically send them basically the same thing but you can set it up to send them a DM asking them to do whatever or sign up to your newsletter. Apparently that's like a massive growth lever that a lot of people I know are using. I just haven't taken the plunge in creating like video content for Instagram.

That was my first ever building in public moment, I think.

Yeah. So I have two rewards now. My whole newsletter is me building in public. And so you would assume that my typical reader is someone who is a startup founder, early startup employee, owns a small medium-sized business, but cares about building their company and probably skews more on like the startup venture-backed side of the world. My whole thesis is being overly transparent and building in public without editing and holding back things. What I have as my first reward is by sharing your link with just a single person, you receive the unedited Series B deck that we used to raise $33 million. And it's like one of those things in Silicon Valley and just startups in general is a lot of founders are very protective and don't share their actual decks or how they raise capital because it talks about your long-term vision, your strategy, your competitors and a bunch of other things I think a lot of people like to keep close to the chest. And again, that's like my advantage is I am more than willing to be transparent and share that. And so I think that's a very unique reward as in like it's again going back to your point, it's one of one, like no one else can really offer that unless they download it and use mine. But for the most part like it's authentic and comes from me. And so like it's our Series B deck that we raised $30 million plus from. And then the second reward is I set up a dropshipping site using Fourth Wall which we integrate directly with and they basically just do merch at scale. And obviously dropshipping is like I don't have any actual inventory, but I've built different designs for different t-shirts and mugs and a few other things. If you share I think it's three referrals, you get maybe 20 or 25% off anything in the store. And then for me as the operator, that's free because I've done the math. If you take 20% off anything in the store, I still like break even on that. So it's cost me nothing. You get discounted goods from the store. And like the hope is that people who actually want to purchase that are fans of the Big Desk Energy brand. Again, not for everyone. But if you've liked the content and like the building in public persona or just the name Big Desk Energy, I actually have great merch that I spent a weekend designing and you can get it for 20% off. But I think the big takeaway from both of those is that neither of them cost me anything. And so when you think back to the Morning Brew referral program that worked so well, the cheat code for that referral program is like yes, we had hats and mugs and t-shirts and sweatshirts, but the first like 10 referrals were totally free for us. I think at three referrals, we added you to an exclusive newsletter. And the thinking was very straightforward, right? It's if you love Morning Brew and you're signing up to be up to date on current events and you read it Monday through Friday, you're also probably someone who would love an extra edition to get ahead on your week that you receive on Sunday. So that cost us zero outside of like, you know, the salary of the person who was already on salary anyway. So it cost zero for someone to join that list. At five, I think we sent stickers, which cost I think at scale maybe a few pennies to ship them out. And then at 10 it was access to this Facebook group for our exclusive insider group. And so to get the 10 referrals it cost us I think when you average it out per referral maybe like two cents which was like the stickers and shipping. And so the key there is like yeah there was flashier t-shirts and mugs and hats. But we didn't actually have to like pay for that until you got to like 25, 50, 100 referrals. At that point, if someone's taking their time to refer a hundred readers, to spend $15 on like a hat and t-shirt for them to bring in that much growth was 100% worth it. The through line to both of those is I don't pay anything for my referral program. And Morning Brew barely paid anything for their first 10 to 15 referrals. I think a lot of people think referral program and they start thinking swag, which then makes you customer service to have to order swag and then ship swag and then deal when it doesn't show up in the mail to whoever you're sending it to. So, I think that's kind of the cheat code.

Yeah. At a thousand referrals, we would buy you a flight to New York City, I think, put you in a hotel, and we had a relationship with the New York Stock Exchange. And so, you would actually get to go to the stock exchange with a few employees and then hang out in the office all day. Then, we typically did like a happy hour of some sort. I think in total, we probably flew 10 people out over the course of like two years.

Yeah. I think if you can think of the Pareto law of like if you could imagine your 10 biggest super fans like how far would they go to do something and in this case referrals to win something else like for you with the event that you run every year right like maybe 100 or 500 referrals get you like a free VIP ticket to the event or something and it could just be their time. We just launched digital products the other week and so I've just been experimenting with launching different products for the sake of getting familiar with how to do it on the platform and I launched like a coaching session which I just priced at $1,000 an hour just to see if anyone would be interested in like a startup coaching session. It's been live for a week, no bites yet. But like it's one of those things that I think like would someone share 50 to 100 times for like an hour coaching session depending on who they are and like what their goals are maybe worth experimenting with.

About 120 today.

Yeah, I'd say all of the things like the gritty things that I have already mentioned were very early days and still continue to this day. So, I still try to post and promote before and after. I still have a VA going and DMing everyone. I still use the recommendation system. I still use the referral program. But the big two things were probably around paid. Paid being one bucket is paid acquisition from Instagram, Facebook, not really much Google, but mostly Instagram and Facebook. I also haven't experimented a ton with X. But I have seen people have success with X. Curious your thoughts. And then the other one is Boost which is basically paid recommendations within the beehiiv network. And so probably put in maybe 100K all time into Boost. Granted that's amortized over the course of two years. So you can, not going to do public math but like what, four to 5,000 a month. So we have this network of 50,000 active publishers within the beehiiv network. Boost allows me to set my own price. So I think it's like a $1.50 or $2 per lead. People apply to my newsletter saying that they want to promote it and then whenever these newsletters send me leads through their signup form, I pay them a $1.50 or two. Boosts kind of get overlooked a lot, especially for growth. And I like Boost for growth because with beehiiv, you can identify like who do you want to boost you and you can reject people that aren't a good fit. That's one thing that's different than a lot of platforms is like you can pick and choose who's going to recommend you and a lot of that improves your quality drastically because like you know what type of newsletters have the audience that you want and who doesn't. Of course you can set your price, your budget. You can also set location too like if you only want subscribers from US, can you only pay for US I think.

We put a ton and arguably too much time into this verification mechanism where it's almost like a money back guarantee where if the subscriber that someone sends you doesn't actually engage or open your newsletters, you have the setting where they either just stay on the list but you don't pay for them or they drop off because they're a lower quality subscriber to keep the list clean. And so we put a lot of time into this verification system. And we also have like anti-spam and security mechanisms that are always identifying. Obviously, we're a global platform. There are plenty of places where people would love to get paid $2 per email submission. And so we have tons of alerts set up to be able to monitor and see when there is fraud in the system to prevent that. So I think those are the pros of Boost and it works really well. Where I'd say the cons are is like we've almost over-indexed on pretending that everyone is a growth manager. When we built this, I imagined myself back when I was leading growth at Morning Brew where I'm like locked into the platform whether it's like Meta or Google or like in this case like a co-registration network and like every day I'm spending time monitoring which publishers are sending me the highest quality leads. Truth is most newsletter operators don't have the time to do that or don't even think like that. And so I actually think we built way too sophisticated of a growth suite for Boost. It's actually one of our big projects that we are launching hopefully in the next like two months, a much much more simpler hands-off like we know what's going to work best. We will feed you the data that you need to know, but like we will automate a lot of this and try to optimize your spend accordingly rather than like building it for like a growth manager. And I think we'll see a lot of success with that new framing.

And one thing that we've over-indexed in quite a bit is there's a lot of transparency in the platform. And so, let's say I have my offer for $2 per lead, and I get 100 applications. Of those applications, you can see their average open rate, average engagement, the location, whether they're US, Canada, UK, like where their subscribers are based, the type of content they're creating. You can see their most recent post. So, there's a lot of transparency. Like if you're going to basically do this handshake deal to pay someone to drive you subscribers, I think you should be able to understand the quality, the types of content they're creating, who their audience is before engaging in that type of business transaction. So we do show a lot of transparent data there which has helped a ton. You can do like auto-accept rules where as applications file in if it meets certain criteria, you don't actually have to approve it. So high open rate, US-based that writes about XYZ. That being said, like yeah, it's a lot of managing and I think it depends on like do most of our writers and content creators want to be growth managers or would they like to grow faster and they're willing to put in a bit of money behind it, but they don't actually want to do the management of all of the levers on like a day-to-day basis. And so I think we over-index for the former and are now trying to serve the latter.

Yeah. So I'll start with the first question. I basically monetize in three different ways. One is just the flip side of Boost. So I boost other newsletters in the ecosystem. I get paid between $1.50 and $3 for everyone I'm sending. So Boost is a two-sided marketplace. I'd say overall that probably is less than 5% of my revenue through the newsletter. I'm not as active as I should be, but Boost is one way. The second one is paid advertisements and sponsors. So, I've used the beehiiv ad network before and that ranges from a few dollars CPC to a few dollars CPM. I've done that to backfill inventory plenty of times. But I also sell direct and so I have my own media kit of which I use beehiiv Surveys to collect information about who my audience is. So, I know the breakdown of like male to female, I know average age, I know interest, I know profession. So I have a lot of first-party and zero-party data on my subscribers that they've given me through the survey form which I collect when people sign up and then I have an automation to collect additional information when you can set up a survey in beehiiv to be a post-subscribe survey. And so every time someone signs up to my newsletter they're taken to a page to submit a survey where I ask about five questions which the entire purpose of that survey is so I can sell advertising because I have a better sense of who my audience is. I've also set up an automation which is triggered when someone signs up and it basically checks three days later did they submit that survey because if they didn't that's valuable information that I did not collect from them. So I actually send an automated email a few days later nudging them to submit their survey and that has actually like a crazy high completion rate. I think of my 120,000 subs about 30 to 40,000 of them have submitted the survey. Crazy high percentage because of both the post-

Yeah. And I bet just to add, it's probably a higher percent of people who sign up via a form. Like, we have a lot of people who sign up via Boost and they're not going to see that survey because they're signing up for another newsletter as well. Surveys are really important. We could spend a lot of time on them. Honestly, with my beehiiv survey, I'm getting like 87 to 90% completion rate after sign up.

Yeah, I'm happy if you — I don't know if you want to do like a lead magnet or include it in the show notes — but I'm happy to link out to my media kit, which I've created from the survey data. So I think that's important to get across to the audience: I need to sell advertising, which is my primary way of monetizing the newsletter. The first question every brand is going to ask is, like, who's your audience? Like, who am I actually paying to get in front of? And while I have data on who's clicking and engaging, and I can make a hypothesis — it's startup founders who are interested in whatever — if you just ask them and collect the correct data, it's so much easier to package who your audience is and sell that advertisement. It's a long-winded way of saying I have collected this data, I have a media kit, and I go out and market and sell advertising to brands, whether it's HubSpot or Vanta or Adio. I'm just giving all my sponsors a shout-out here. But yeah, those are mostly B2B-type software platforms.

And I think it's also important for newsletter operators to understand, like, if they are going to monetize with sponsors, who's the right sponsor where it makes sense for them to pay a large sum of money to get in front of that audience. And the reason why I bring that up is, like, HubSpot, for example, can start at $30,000 per year. And if I do have these 120,000 subscribers who are startup founders, HubSpot might pay me $5,000 to $7,000 per sponsorship, and they only need one person to sign up to, like, a HubSpot enterprise plan and they have crazy ROAS. And so I think that's important in the sense that a lot of people think more consumer platforms like Spotify would never make sense to sponsor my newsletter for signing up for a $12 to $14 monthly plan because it would need hundreds of people to convert. But HubSpot needs one. And so I think that is also important when you're positioning your newsletter and thinking about monetization: to understand who your audience is and who are the brands that would ideally like to get in front of that audience.

Yeah. And the last thing I'd say in terms of monetization is like, you know, you mentioned B2B. I'm not like a B2B publisher per se, but events are something that's really interesting. And so I think when most people think of paid media, it is sponsorship and it is paid subscriptions. And I don't have a paid subscription for my newsletter, but people often overlook what I consider is like the more creative ways that you can extract revenue from your audience. And so because I am building in public as a startup founder and have attracted a lot of other startup founders to read the newsletter, I launched this mastermind, basically like a founder mastermind that I host in Costa Rica. It's $10,000 per person. We host about seven to eight people. And by we, I mean me. I've done it all myself. I've done four of them and the fifth one's coming up in a few weeks. But it's $70,000 in revenue.

Obviously there's costs. I rent like a big house, we get a boat, there's like a chef. So, like, there's a lot of costs that add up, but it's one, something I actually genuinely enjoy doing. I've met 25 to 30 incredible founders that I have like this tight-knit network that I've built on Slack. It's a great experience to learn and connect with other people. And then as far as like revenue, it's probably 50–60% profit margins on these events. And so I think it's just like getting outside of the box and thinking what value can you provide these content creators. I think what got me to think about that is there was like a surfer YouTuber who was trying to figure out how to monetize, and I think everyone at the table at the time was talking about run more ads, find a brand sponsor that you can promote in your videos, and he ended up landing on doing a surf school once a year and it made far more money than paid ads would have ever made him. And so I think it's just like the thinking outside the box and like the IRL component. Doesn't have to be IRL, could be totally remote, but I think there's like a lot of opportunities to monetize audiences once you can capture their attention.