We have a newsletter that has 10,000 readers about magicians. It's for magicians, 10,000 readers, they make 70 grand a year through subscriptions. My newsletter makes like three or four hundred dollars a year as a six-hour side project.
Hi Tyler, welcome to Scalable. Thanks for being here.
So, I'd love to get your pulse on kind of the newsletter industry. We've seen all sorts of newsletter providers roll out video, all sorts of other — you've done paid products. So, newsletters in general aren't just newsletters anymore, right? When we launched Scalable, it wasn't just a newsletter. It was a podcast, an event, all these other things. So, talk about what's happening in the industry and why everyone's doing that.
I think what you said — what you were like, when we launched Scalable, it wasn't just a newsletter. I think the most successful content creators today are going multi-channel. You can't be just video, you can't be just podcast, you can't be just newsletter. The most successful creators have a little bit of all of that, which I think is reflected in our roadmap. So, we started our bread and butter and still is newsletters. What content creators want today in 2026? It's to be multi-channel and the consolidation of not having to log in to four or five different software platforms, understand what's working, what's not, and who your audience is. I think convenience is like a huge factor here.
Do you think you can have a successful business just with a newsletter today?
I mean, the answer is yes, 'cause we see it all the time. And I mean, everything from these large AI newsletters that are on our platform. I mean, there's so many examples. I mean, but then you see, you know, Morning Brew was a newsletter for four years until they eventually started launching podcasts and then doing like different types of content. The same with The Hustle, right? I look at Morning Brew and The Hustle as like the quintessential like OG newsletter companies. And even Axios, right? Like those big — those are the big three in my mind when I think of like OG newsletter. And all of them have gotten into events, podcasts, video, social. It depends what success is. We have so many newsletters that are very successful by every measure that are just newsletter. But we're building for the kind of the top 1% of content creators as well.
How do you assess the quality of subscribers? We have a very B2B. 45% of our readers are executives and founders. So, that's a really compelling story that we can bring to sponsors as well.
But, like how do you quantify? I think there's this whole conversation now about like follower counts and what matters and what doesn't, but like how do you assess that? We're almost at 15,000 Scalable newsletter subscribers. Like, how does that compare to like 100k for like a food newsletter?
It doesn't, which is like why it's like important to realize. Like, I just pulled this data the other day, but we have a newsletter that has 10,000 readers about magicians. It's for magicians. 10,000 readers, they make 70 grand a year through subscriptions. And there's such power in niche audiences.
Where it used to be, oh, The Hustle has 4 million readers and Morning Brew has 2 million and selling scale. You can sell scale and there's plenty of publishers that sell that I have a massive audience. There's other publishers and content creators that say, I have the audience for CMOs, for marketers, for fashion. And knowing what game you're in is like really important. And then if you flip it, it's like from the advertiser perspective, like where can they go to reach that audience and like how competitive can you be there? And if you say that you have a very engaged audience and there's other ways to quantify that as well. Like, what data do you have on them? Are they showing up to events? Very surface level is open rate and click-through rate. It's like if Scalable hosts an event in LA like you did.
How many people click to RSVP, to apply, to sign up? 'Cause those are people that I would pay — transition from subscribers to fans. And like that's really what you want to monetize.
So, you write your own newsletter also, Big Desk Energy. Great name. What have you learned from writing your own newsletter?
My Saturday night in Paris was spent in the hotel room alone till midnight writing my newsletter, which is not how I would have preferred to spend a Saturday night in Paris. But, it's a grind. I was in denial initially thinking it could be like a fun little side project that I spend a little bit of time on. It takes 5 to 6 hours every week and it's really hard. But I'd say the flip side of that, it's the most rewarding thing that I do on so many different levels. One, I have so many founders that respond to me saying, 'I've implemented XYZ strategy that you talked about and it's totally transformed the company.' Which is like very fulfilling to hear. We've gotten so much business like second hand from the newsletter. So the story that I always give is one of our largest enterprise customers is Time. Time's CTO signed up for Big Desk Energy like a year and a half ago with no relation to me or Beehiiv.
Do you know how he found it?
No, no idea. But he just like somehow the CTO of Time stumbled into Big Desk Energy, signed up to it, read the content, understood who I was, what we're building, the values and the things that we care about, and resonated enough to be able to make a case internally to Time to migrate all of their newsletters over to our platform.
And that turned into a huge enterprise deal for you. So I think, I mean, it's the bull case on like the creator economy and especially a creator with a business attached to it.
Even though I don't know if I consider myself a creator.
Everyone's a creator today.
Everyone's a creator today. But yeah, it's been so rewarding and it's opened so many doors for me and the business.
Does it also help you kind of understand the pain points better? I think Adam Mosseri has talked a lot about this. He does so many Instagram videos. He's become kind of a creator and I think often like his team tells me they're like, 'Oh, then we got like a request' 'cause Adam's like, 'Oh, well what if we put this...'
I mean, dogfooding — I'm the biggest fan of, right? So I'm in the platform every day a few hours a day. I write my newsletter 6 hours a week. I'm using the automations. Like I am a Beehiiv power user. And so when things frustrate me and I run the product team and I have a direct line to every engineer and I know exactly who built what. Like that's part of the reason why we do move so quickly is I can feel the pain points and escalate them very quickly. But our whole team actually dogfoods the product. Almost every team lead sends like a monthly recap email to the team. I'd say about like a fifth of the company actually has a side project newsletter that they send, which is — we have so much active feedback coming from users, but also our own employees and it's so easy to escalate them and improve the platform.
I want to talk a little bit about the competition. You've likened yourself to Shopify and Substack to Amazon. So explain what that means 'cause oftentimes you guys are put head-to-head.
Yeah, we are put head-to-head a lot, which is interesting because outside of both starting with newsletters and launching roughly around the same time, I think the direction that they're moving in and the direction we're moving in are two totally different directions. There are millions of third-party sellers on Amazon, but when you go to Amazon, you don't always know who you're buying from. You go to the amazon.com website. You go to the Amazon app. If you have customer support, you go through the Amazon support. It shows up in an Amazon box. Like they have totally intermediated themselves between the provider of goods and the customer. You become overly dependent on the Amazon machine, which they can give or take away, which is true of every distribution platform, and they own a lot of the data and don't surface it back to the brands and know who their customers actually are. The reason why a lot of people don't sell on Amazon is if you go direct, you know their email, their name, their address, their buying behavior, so you can retarget them. But you can't do that on Amazon.
Shopify's tools and infrastructure. You could be buying stuff on — I guess Allbirds was the example I always gave, but now they pivoted and now that's no longer a great example. But you could be on Allbirds' website and not even know that it was built on Shopify. They're just back-end tools and infrastructure.
That's what I feel about our website.
Totally. Like we want people to go on Scalable and not know that it was built by Beehiiv 'cause like it shouldn't be. It's your company, it's your brand. Like we don't want to intermediate between that. And so that's where the analogy is. Like I see very much Substack is you have to download the Substack app. They decide what content gets like proliferated in their algorithm in their app. They have so much data on readers that they do not share with the content creators. And they might promote your content today, but there's no guarantee that they'll continue to promote your content, or they have competing content that maybe they have a better take rate with another creator in your same category that they would favor over you because they make more money. And so, there's a lot of misaligned incentives when you become overly dependent and they intermediate entirely between the writer and the audience. Again, we're tools and infrastructure. There's no algorithm. We give you all of the data possible. We make it easy to port your data. Like if we ever messed up and you wanted to leave Beehiiv, you can take all of your subscriber data and everything to any platform that you want.
You can leave Substack, too?
Kind of. With an asterisk. One, they don't give you all of the data, and two, because they have this Apple in-app payment, Apple payments don't transfer. So, if you have — let's say you have 100 paying subscribers and 20 are using Apple. If you wanted to migrate to Beehiiv, those 20 on Apple would not come with you.
So, that's more of an Apple problem. Like, it's a Substack problem that they're using Apple, but that's Apple gatekeeping, you...
It's Apple gatekeeping, but that is also part of like being an app and having like an intermediary. If we don't want to pick on Substack, we can pick on Patreon. Patreon has had a business with all of these paid podcasts. You cannot move your paying subscribers on Patreon to another platform. And like, that is this pure creator lock-in. And I think creator lock-in is the worst thing you can do as a platform because who's to say that Patreon's around for the next three to four years? What's to say they don't have layoffs and they are not investing in the areas that you need as a creator. And if you actually cannot move your data and your content and your paying subscribers to another platform, you're totally beholden to a platform and their success, their priorities, their roadmap.
And as you're building out podcasting and all these other things, is that the case for Beehiiv?
Totally. Data portability, 100%. We're built on top of Stripe. You can port it over to other platforms. Like, that's very intentional.
So, Beehiiv's not going to launch an app anytime soon, is that right?
Not launching an app, exactly. And there's other aspects, too. Like, we don't take a take rate, right? Like, I think both Patreon, Substack...
Well, there's your SaaS business if...
...and a lot of other creator businesses have built these predatory take rates that typically only go up in one direction. All right, Patreon was lesser before, now it's 10 to 12%. All of these take rate businesses eventually meet a point where they need to make more revenue, and the only lever they have is by increasing the take rate. And so, we're the only platform, whether it's paid subscriptions, digital products, webinars, like we don't take a cut of revenue from our users. So, the combination of not taking a cut of revenue, of making it easy to port your data in different places, and then the all-in-one...
And the other caveat is like an open platform as well. Both Patreon, Substack, and a lot of these other platforms don't allow you to connect with third parties. So, if you have like a Slack community or you use whatever XYZ tool for your business, you should be able to use an API and a webhook to sync your business together. They operate in closed ecosystems, so you are only as good as the roadmap that they're willing to give you. And I think that also fundamentally limits what you can do on those platforms.
So, who is your biggest competitor? I would say it's Substack. Even though you play in different realms, I think you guys still compete with them for writers.
I do. I mean, when I say we're going in different directions, we're still very much in the similar ballpark, but diverging I think pretty quickly. But I mean, you would also probably say Shopify's biggest competitor is still Amazon. And I think if anything, that is a sign that there can be two players with two totally different ideologies both succeed at a massive scale. I would have loved to be a shareholder of both Shopify and Amazon for the past 20 years. And so, like is there a world where we coexist? Like I totally think that's possible.
What's your advice for someone who wants to start a newsletter today? I mean, it feels like every part of the creator economy is so crowded and competitive, but are there certain areas, strategies, things that are untapped still? I mean, magician newsletter is a new one for me.
Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. I love that example 'cause like — one thing that I think Beehiiv does really well is like democratizes access to the long tail of content creators, which is where I was going to go with this answer. Like you don't have to be mainstream business news or crypto or AI. You really just want to find a topic that you're passionate about, that you can enjoy creating content and serving audience better than other people. And so I think like where most people get caught up is they would think themselves into a pretzel of how do I build a market? What's like the go-to-market for the next 6 months? How do I get advertisers? Like just getting started and taking things one step at a time, figuring out what you like creating content, who you can create content for. I think value starts to surface as you go on that journey. But I think a lot of most people don't ever get started on that journey because they can't see a viable path towards profitability or revenue. And I think that's probably the wrong way to think about it.
Is there a certain threshold that you need to hit? Like is it 10,000 subscribers? Is there a certain number or way of the head to be like, 'Okay, this is working and I can actually monetize this now?' Or can you monetize with like 50?
I would say like way back when, pre-Beehiiv, like the answer I would always give is like 10,000. 'Cause like you need enough where an advertiser or marketer at a company would at least pay attention to you that they would sponsor your newsletter. Or enough that if you could convert two to three percent of them into a paying subscriber that you could build like a healthy subscription business. But with Beehiiv, like to talk our own book, like you can monetize day one. You don't need a large audience, but you can use the Beehiiv ad network and monetize your first 10 with 15 readers.
But you're not going to make a lot of money doing that.
Not going to make a ton of money yet, but like though I think making some money and building momentum is really what you need to get started. Paid subscriptions, like you could have 100 readers and if 80 of them are paying you tens, hundreds of dollars per month, like there's a business to be had there.
Are there any areas that are untapped? I mean one thing that I've seen is just rise of AI focused content, right? Which we didn't see a few years ago and really helping either people tactically understand AI or more from like a consumer perspective. So that's like a new category, right? But, are there other things that you're seeing or that you see openings for?
I think there's so many like tangential topics off of AI specifically, right? Like at first it was like, 'What's the news happening in AI?' But, now there's like this whole subset of, 'How do you use AI as an employee? How do you use AI as a student? How do you use AI as an employee at XYZ company?' But, when we first started Beehiiv, it was 2020, 2021, crypto was the thing that everyone was writing about. So, like the majority of our newsletters were all crypto.
