What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another edition of the Ad Podcast. We are here with Tyler Denk, the CEO of beehiiv. You guys all know beehiiv as the newsletter platform that gives independent creators tools and the ability to build an audience that they own, that the platforms don't control, giving them different tools to monetize their audiences. So, Tyler, thanks for coming on, man.
Yeah, so tell me a little bit about what you guys had going on at Cannes this week. How's things been for you as we wrap up the week?
Been a very busy week for a lot of reasons. We do a lot of different things. So, obviously, our core users are content creators and publishers, of which there's — I'm sure you've noticed how many content creators are here this year, especially relative to the previous years. I think they're having like a huge wave of just more brands buying into creator economy and marketing by leveraging these different unique audiences that they have. So, everyone that's here from the creators and publishers could and should be our users. On the flip side, we also have the beehiiv ad network. We send over 4 billion emails every single month with very highly engaged audiences. And so, today, we have brands like Nike, Netflix, Roku, HubSpot, all investing into the ad network. You can think of it as — the problem that it solves, really, is if you've ever sponsored a newsletter, you go back and forth going through like stats and metrics and negotiating and then like what and then scheduling.
It's a lot of hard to scale when you go one newsletter at a time, right?
And if you find that newsletters work well, which many of them do if you find the right audience, then your growth marketer's job becomes what other newsletters exist like that newsletter.
So, it almost gives you a way to test the network for high velocity association with your brand. What newsletters is your brand responding? And then you can figure out if those categories, then you can go out and build direct relationships with those creators.
Yes and no, but I'm even like historically, I'd say like if you were just investing outside of the beehiiv ad network. If you were investing in a newsletter, you find one that works, and then now it's your team's job to figure out what other newsletters exist that I could also invest in marketing. And like where do you even go to find that list of newsletters? And then you're also doing those one-to-one negotiations and copy and scheduling for all of them. And so that's really where the beehiiv Ad Network comes in. If you're a brand and you want to target women in their 30s that are into health and wellness, we can pull immediately that we have 7,000 newsletters that fit that exact criteria.
You know the exact scale, the open rate, the cost.
All first-party data, it's trusted. And so rather than you going to 7,000 individual newsletters and negotiating, you can hit all of them. And because we have an ML team that's building all of these models, we'll quickly identify which are performing better in real time. We have a beehiiv ad pixel. So we actually track conversion all the way down funnel.
real-time dashboards. So really what we're trying to build is what I describe as the Facebook ad manager for newsletters. And we also launched podcast recently, so eventually beyond just newsletters. But for right now, the focus is so many — and our renewal rate right now is 80%.
Which means prices probably need to go up.
Which means it's working. Yeah, which means your CPMs are too low, right?
But yeah, so I say all of that because like obviously we are in Cannes Lions. It's traditionally an advertising fest. And there's tons of people here representing from big agencies and big brands. And those are the relationships that we want to be building to have them on board and leverage the beehiiv Ad Network.
I love it. Tell me more about the podcast play because obviously that's interesting, too. A podcaster, you know, one of the things — I've never gone into the newsletter space, whether it's with you guys or some of the other places where creators can build newsletters, mainly because I'm not a writer. I'm a podcaster. I like to have conversations with people, but I'm not a traditionally trained journalist. I don't particularly love writing. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't build up — it's not work that I enjoy doing, so I've pretty much ignored it, probably to my detriment because I know it's a really sticky channel that I should be active. So, tell me about going into podcasting and are you guys building out any kind of tools that allow journalists to become podcasters and podcasters to become journalists?
Yeah. I actually want to push — I'm curious the difference of how you see journalists and podcasters, right?
Good question. Well, I think, you know, podcasting — you turn on a mic. If you're someone who's used to having conversations, you know, I came out of the sell side of the advertising industry. So, my job for the last 15 years is to fly around the country or jump on a Zoom call, walk into a room, spark up a conversation, present a clear message, but communicate in person or, you know, in the physical. And writing is just — it's a different skill set, right? To be a great writer, you have to enjoy sitting down and pecking away and going through versioning and all that kind of stuff. So, just something that I know that I need to get to that I've just been dreading, to be quite honest.
I know there's a lot of tools out there where you can like, you know, take your podcast, run it through transcription and probably use AI, but it's like you also want to remain authentic and, you know, create real things and not just more AI slop, right?
Yeah. And to go back to your initial question around like why podcasting and our vision for that. The way the ecosystem looked before beehiiv was traditionally you had a website and your blog and you'd post on like WordPress. If you had a newsletter, you copy and paste all of that content into Mailchimp. If you wanted ads, you can use like programmatic ads which is a different platform that you put into your newsletter or your
Nobody's going to dot coms anymore. The only people that come to my website want to find my email address.
Good. So, you should launch a newsletter.
Yeah, that's a great idea. No, I'm definitely feeling it. Well, maybe I'll have to connect with you guys after for some pointers.
And then if you wanted to have a subscription business, you have to also add Stripe or authentication and the authentication there.
A bunch of tools you have to bolt together to have the full funnel.
And so that ecosystem, what it looks like, is six or seven different platforms that as a content creator or publisher, like your skill set is creating content. Your skill set isn't signing up and paying for seven different platforms, then figuring out how to make them all speak together. And when one doesn't work, then the whole thing kind of breaks down. And so that really was the initial thesis of beehiiv, it's can we build this all-in-one platform where your website, your newsletter, your advertising, your subscriptions, everything is in a single unified platform. We think the convenience factor is huge for content creators, and there's a lot of other benefits. And when you extend that one layer deeper, a lot of our users, because they are creating content primarily for newsletters, also have podcasts.
And so now it was I run most of my business through beehiiv, but podcasts are over on this other platform. So that was the first insight that they enjoyed — like I think we're very good at shipping product.
I think our engineering product design team is like second-to-none, and so people enjoy running their business within the beehiiv platform. And podcasting was like an okay platform for a lot of these people.
Yeah.
Are you servicing as like a centralized distribution hub the way say Spotify for creators might?
Totally. So we aren't the destination of where consumers would listen to podcasts.
But it's where you're hosting the files. So you don't need
Exactly. You would publish the podcast file there with any like metadata. We'll do like a full transcription, but we then upload and distribute that to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all of the major players. And then the second insight that we had is a lot of podcasters had very little affinity for their podcast host. If you ask them, they either didn't know who they used, or they didn't care at all, and they were like, 'Hey, I like using beehiiv already, and I'm using it daily.'
Yeah, it's just the easy way to consolidate tools and workflows.
Totally. So that's like really the core thesis behind it, but then as we go deeper, like what does the future of podcasting on beehiiv look like? Obviously, if right now you can bundle a newsletter subscription with your podcast. By the time this airs, we are announcing — or actually 5 minutes before you came
before we hit the button. So
Yeah, yeah, we just shipped Spotify open access, which basically ties your paid-only podcast being available on Spotify to sync to your beehiiv account as well.
So, if I had a newsletter on beehiiv, which I do, if you were to upgrade to a paid account with my content, it would also unlock my paid podcasts on Spotify. All in like one unified layer.
Yeah, I know a lot of podcasters, like Jocko Willink, for instance, has his big show, but then he's got his like, you know, members-only show for like
