Welcome to another episode of the Ad Tech God Pod, where we speak to the founders of our industry. Normally I speak with Ad Tech veterans, people who work in the space. Today I actually have the co-founder of beehiiv, Tyler Denk. Before launching beehiiv, Tyler was part of the early team at Morning Brew, where he saw firsthand how newsletters could grow into a meaningful media business. And so he's doing that today with over 170,000 publications and reaching over 400 million people. So his reach is massive. If you're not familiar with Tyler or beehiiv, check it out. You will enjoy this interview, that's for sure. Tyler, thank you again for joining me on the pod today.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So I would consider myself a super user. I've been using beehiiv for a couple of years, everything from segments to surveys to our main website, everything is there. I personally really like the product. But before we kind of dig into some of the new products and features you've released, can you just take some of the audience back to, you know, your background, why you started beehiiv, and I guess what got you to where you're at today?
Yeah, for sure. To take a few steps back, I joined Morning Brew as you mentioned in the intro back in 2017 as the second employee. My job there was to run product, engineering, and growth. So I worked with the content team and the writers. We built our own content management system. So that's what they used to create the newsletter. I worked with the ad sales team and the partnerships team to build this proprietary ad management platform which managed all of the inventory of upcoming ad placements within the newsletter. It reported metrics back to the advertisers. It inserted the ads directly into the newsletter. So that was a well-oiled machine. I built the website. I ran the growth. I ran the marketing campaigns, built the dashboards. All in all, kind of built like what I would consider the internal infrastructure of Morning Brew.
And that led us to when I joined, we had 100,000 readers, scaled it to 4 million readers up through the acquisition in 2020 from Business Insider. And on that journey, obviously learned so much working next to the content creators and writers and building tech for them. And then sitting next to my other side, the sales team and building the tech for them to be able to monetize the different newsletter assets. And through that, the beautiful thing about newsletters is you can reply to an email and get directly in contact with the person who wrote it. We would receive thousands of replies every day. And about a few hundred per day were actually people asking us, 'How did you build the newsletter? How does the design look that way? How are you scaling it so quickly? How did you build the referral program? What data are you looking at?' And those emails would get forwarded to me from our intern team. And it became very obvious to me that what we had built was actually super valuable. And that whether they were writers at different businesses, whether they were hobbyists who wanted to launch a newsletter, there was this massive gap in the market for building best-in-class newsletters that could scale and monetize to the effect that Morning Brew had. And Morning Brew became kind of this beacon in this newsletter and media ecosystem of everyone wanted to build a newsletter that was Morning Brew for X, Morning Brew for crypto, Morning Brew for AI, Morning Brew for sports, Morning Brew for politics.
And that was really the impetus for beehiiv. We built this tech internally. My users were the 30 employees at the company. But the input from everyone externally who wanted what we had built is what gave me the vision of there's clearly market demand here, and what we had built was great. So we fast forward, me and my two co-founders, both of them were also early software engineers at Morning Brew. We launched what initially was Morning Brew in a Box, which is beehiiv. It was the best and still is the best place to launch and scale and monetize your newsletter. We go head-to-head with enterprise ESPs like Campaign Monitor and Sailthru, which is what we used at Morning Brew in terms of, you know, how to create content, how to do automations, all of the data, all of the workflows. Like we can do that with the best of them on the enterprise side, but at consumer prices. So we've kind of democratized access to those types of capabilities.
And where we started off with newsletters, we have since gotten into, we've launched a website builder, so you can host your website similar to like a Squarespace or Wix. We launched digital products. So now that you are a subject matter expert writing about XYZ topic, you can create guides and templates and coaching sessions directly on the platform and we don't take a cut of revenue. We launched podcast hosting a few months ago, and so you can host, distribute, and monetize your podcast directly on the beehiiv platform. And then just a few weeks ago, we launched community, so you can actually build your own native custom branded community to go deeper with your audience. And so while newsletter is still at the heart of everything we do, we have evolved into this content creator operating system of sorts.
Yeah, because I was going to ask you prior to you getting into all the new product releases that you have. Like the newsletter business is kind of like a legacy business overall, right? Like it's been around for a long time, but it didn't really change. Nobody really innovated and nobody specifically helped you grow. It was all about import or capture your users' audience or your users' email. It was limited data on them. There was no real flow to capture that information, their name, their title, etc. It wasn't that customizable. You drop an email, you send an email blast, and you kind of cross your fingers and hope that somebody likes it and forwards it. But now what we notice is that we get a ton of referrals from competitors, like other marketing newsletters, even people that are kind of adjacent to us that maybe are not focused on ad tech, but are in media or in social. And it's really kind of creating this flywheel of growth where everybody's helping each other's lists get bigger, which then makes it easier to monetize and to promote what we're doing.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to call out like the ecosystem that we initially entered was not too long ago people would host their website on WordPress. And then to create a newsletter, they would copy and paste their content into Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor or whatever the ESP is. And the ESP really had one job. It was whether you craft like the drag-and-drop template or you drop in HTML, you create some email, you choose the list, you hit send. And that was it. Right? Like there was no way to monetize that content through that ESP. Like they were simply a mechanism to get an email out of your head and into the inbox of your audience and nothing else. And what we did at Morning Brew is we built all of these tools to help us grow faster. So, we did co-registration, we partnered with other newsletters. Like we had all of these strategies to grow faster. We built a referral program, which helped turn our existing audience into a growth lever to accelerate growth even more. We had sponsorships, we had paid subscriptions. So, like all of these like tangential things around the actual sending of a newsletter that helps you grow faster and monetize is what we built in-house at Morning Brew. And those were like custom add-ons that I had built.
And that's really what it takes to scale a newsletter and get the full value extraction out of it. And so, I think that's really where the innovation came when we launched in 2021 is we're not just another Mailchimp. We are everything around sending the email that you need to be successful built natively into the platform.
You know, I think one of the biggest things that was a miss before you guys came out with it was like you said, you would copy the content over from your blog, put it in your newsletter, you send it out, and you'd probably have links that link them back to your website. But with the website builder, what I generally like and what we've been doing is the content that we're generating lives on forever on a single page, and it's actually helping SEO. And it's helping us take a presence, right? We write so much content at Marketing Architecture along from our, you know, five or six newsletters that we manage, maybe more, that like we're dominating the search engine when you look up anything advertising media marketing related, and we don't have to copy and paste. We're writing the newsletters to the right format, to the right length. We're SEOing the title, the URL. Everything is pretty much automated with you guys with some minor edits that we put in ourselves. And then we are all over the web. And this is not two steps, it's now one step. Write a good newsletter and click publish. And I think that alone for a startup, for us, has made it so much easier to just write, publish, and then move on and write again, and publish, and not have to worry about managing a website anymore. The website's just part of the package, and it's been really nice.
And that is one of our big value adds is exactly what you just said there. It is how can we do all of the hard things around scaling newsletters, so our users can focus exclusively on what they're best at, which is creating content. It's not SEO optimizing the post, making sure it's like AEO GEO optimized for these different LLMs, which is all we've spent the past three weeks doing everything under the sun to make sure every piece of content that is hosted on beehiiv is AEO GEO optimized for these different LLMs. We want to put our engineering resources into making all of that behind the scenes done best in practice, like best possible, and then our users can just focus on creating content.
Right. Speaking of SEO LLMs, we did the MCP integration recently that you guys have, and we used that to redesign one of our newsletters and published it and made minor edits in your new kind of drag-and-drop designer, and it was super easy. What we're realizing is you don't have to be a newsletter expert to be able to bring a newsletter to life. Like the team, all of us have never written newsletters. Yet we're all creating them left and right and having very limited assistance with the exception of really our account manager when we need to dig in and ask some deeper questions. But for the most part, it's self-sufficient.
Yeah, the MCP is not even built just to expose like functionality in the platform. It's built on top of like our entire corpus of like tens of thousands of blog posts that we've written, best practices, our knowledge base, our YouTube tutorials. So it really captures not just how to use the platform, but playbooks of how to extract the most value and build the best workflows and make sure that your newsletter is actually successful. And we just launched this Copilot last week as well, which you can think of as an MCP but built directly into the platform. We just want to expand the surface area of our users being able to get this support and the functionality that they need to succeed. And then yeah, we're doing that via both the MCP and Copilot.
You announced the Copilot just a few days ago. Obviously, it takes actions inside the platform that you have. Do you think from like the creator aspect or perspective, the creator business side of things, do you expect more AI to manage their workflow and their presence online? How do you see like Copilot and the launch of an AI solution as something to help your creators build better, I guess?
Yeah, I mean, we're seeing that now. There's an email I got the other day from a user who was like, 'Why am I doing X, Y, and Z still like manually as a human when like there should be an agent just doing that on my behalf?' And I think that's like there's a cohort of the market and I think it will be a growing cohort of the market that really just wants to focus on creating content. They want to oversee that the list is growing. They want to oversee that there's engagement happening. They want to oversee their monetization. But they want to outsource a lot of the manual labor to some sort of agent or AI that can do a lot of that for them. So, I think that is a growing cohort of people. And we specifically don't have like an AI like writing tool per se. Like we, and I'm not super opinionated one way or another there. I think if you're creating content or you have an AI that's trained on data that's creating content, as long as it's providing value and that value could be informative or entertainment to the end user or reader, like I think that's up to them to decide whether they care if it's AI generated or not. But there is a fine line of like we aren't positioning our AI as this will replace the user and this will replace the creativity and content creation. Rather it is what is all of the admin things that take a ton of time to scale a successful newsletter or podcast or community and how can we abstract a lot of those admin tasks for an AI agent to do?
You mentioned earlier in the pod, you've got the newsletter, which is your core, website, podcasts, communities, advertising. You've got a ton. Like you've basically taken four or five different companies and consolidated into one. What's the purpose of doing that outside of kind of the efficiencies you and I talked about? Are you finding that as you mentioned, an operating system for creators is the way to go and to just utilize everything and just create everything in one spot for them to manage? But what's like the overall goal with doing so?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of value in consolidation for a few reasons. One is I think the most successful content creators today aren't just YouTubers, they're not just podcasters, they're not just newsletter operators, but they usually go across multiple different channels. So, they have all of those things and they're selling digital products and they also have a community. And historically, not dissimilar to when I described the ecosystem about what the industry looked like before beehiiv for like email, when you were copy and pasting from WordPress into Mailchimp, and you had like five or six different platforms just to scale a newsletter. I think to be a publisher or content creator today, you have your podcast hosting platform, you have a newsletter platform, you have a website platform, you have a separate community platform, you might have a membership platform that runs like the subscriptions through all of it. And as an independent content creator, that is a ton of admin work and operational complexity to do all of those. As a publisher, maybe you don't have the deepest bench of tech talent to be able to build all of these integrations. And then operationally, like now you have all of these data silos where, you know, your newsletter data lives in one platform, but are those the same people that are buying and attending IRL events and booking coaching sessions and buying products and listening to your podcast? Like it's hard to actually tie them all together and get an actual unified view over who is your audience and who's engaging and who's not. And by pulling them all into a single platform, we can make that really easy. And as people launch more subscription products, having a single subscription product that allows you to pay for a paid newsletter and get access to a paid podcast and join this community. Like you can sync that all up in like two or three clicks within the beehiiv platform. So, I do think there's a lot of value for a lot of different reasons for building this kind of operating system where you don't have to juggle four or five different platforms.
