Hey everybody, welcome to the midweek edition of NextT Talks, our little audio and video adventure with our pals over at MediaPlay News. In the middle of the week, we have a special guest, Tyler Denk, the CEO and founder of beehiiv, which is the platform upon which we run our newsletter, NextTMT. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the big news that they have put out in the last few days, as we look also more generally at the whole universe of these smaller media companies that are now getting more and more sophisticated across multiple platforms and how they're trying to solve some of that. We'll get into some news. It turns out just today the European Union waved through the Paramount Skydance/Warner Brothers Discovery — it is impossible to say that quickly — merger, which leaves only some disgruntled attorneys general in 12 states to say maybe not so fast. And we got a few other odds and ends we'll probably get into, but that's a pretty good start. So, welcome.
Tyler let us use this platform. They didn't even do a background check on us, Dave. They just let us in.
Well, that's why we're able to use the platform. So, I'm just saying thank goodness for that.
And open platforms. We love these. How has using the platform been?
Well, I've never used any other newsletter platform. Let me just say that.
Personally, well, but the reality is you have been on content management systems of one kind or another. I have since the '80s.
Listen, these guys are trying hard. You guys are always iterating, coming up with new schemes, new get-rich-quick schemes. And what I like about your get-rich-quick schemes is they involve your users. So, and that's kind of what I guess in October of 2024, being a noob, I'd heard about you guys really focused on the aspirations and goals of your users, and I heard that sponsorship was an easier goal for beehiiv than it was the competition. So, that's what drew us. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what's going on. There is a lot of competition in your area, and you guys have done some pretty notable additions to features.
Let's talk about the big news things that he's got. He's got a whole community feature, going programmatic on the ad side. You got AI MCP, I guess is the term of art, that is being rolled out to basically let AI write all this stuff so we don't have to even think. It's not like I do, but you know, and a few other odds and ends. So, you got a much better, a more WYSIWYG, as they used to say back in the day, WYSIWYG publishing platform. You got a lot. It's a lot. What were you doing all week?
Well, talking to you guys now. To Dan's point, jokes aside, our thesis really is we want our users to grow as fast as possible and to make as much money as possible. And I think if as a platform we can deliver on those, most of our users will be very happy. Yeah, happy to talk through some of the recent announcements. I think it might be helpful actually to take a step back for a second and kind of tell the quick story of like what beehiiv does and like how we got to this point, and I think that will dovetail nicely with the most recent announcements. But at a quick highlight, I was previously the second employee at Morning Brew, which was a wildly successful email newsletter. We scaled it to 4 million readers. We sold it for $75 million to Business Insider. And as I led product and engineering and growth there, we built this entire bespoke ecosystem to create newsletters, to grow them faster, and to monetize them. And so beehiiv, we launched this with two of my co-founders in 2021 to be...
But Tyler, Tyler, you built that while still with Morning Brew, or coming out of that, having done that with Morning Brew and scaled it up. You said we can do this for everybody else, right? Is that the process really?
Yeah, exactly. I joined Morning Brew and I built the content management system that the writers used to create the newsletter. I built an ad management platform for the sales team to monetize the newsletter. I was running Facebook ads. I was building funnels. I was scaling the newsletter. I was building dashboards. So, while most of the credit goes to the writers and the content for being fantastic, we also had built a well-oiled machine that made all of that possible in the back end, which was kind of my doing. And so through that experience, we received hundreds and thousands of emails from our readers who were also operating a newsletter at their business or as a side project, who looked at Morning Brew as this north star of like, this is what a newsletter could and should be, and we want the same software that they use. And they would ask me...
But they weren't going to do that, right? They weren't going to say, 'No, it's not our business to be a service provider. We're a site, right?' I pitched it. I pitched it.
And yeah, I pitched both the co-founders to say, 'Hey, I think what we built is...' The demand was very obvious because we would get thousands of emails asking for the software. And what the readers wanted was they thought that we were just using software vendor X and they just wanted to know who should we use. But there wasn't software vendor X. It was a totally custom thing that I had built along with my co-founders there. And so once I saw that demand, I pitched the two co-founders saying, 'I think we should build a SaaS platform here. We already have the distribution. We send an email to 4 million people every morning.' Like, how many companies would die to reach 4 million people every single morning? And we're already seeing that...
Us, we would die for that.
Yeah. And so we... Yeah. So I saw the opportunity there and I pitched both of the co-founders. What I didn't know at the time is that they were already in talks with Business Insider to sell the company, and it's a little bit of a curveball in the middle of this diligence to disclose that you're now a SaaS platform in addition to the media company. So, they rightfully or wrongfully shot down my idea, and you know, who knows what that would have done to the deal. Who knows if I'd be here if they were super enthusiastic about it. But yeah, I think that was really the impetus for seeing what that potential could be and eventually launching beehiiv. So if you fast forward a year or two, in 2021, we launched with my two co-founders. The goal was Morning Brew in a box — like, can we build the best newsletter? Can we allow people to build, scale, grow, monetize their newsletters better than any other platform? When you look at the broader email ecosystem, a lot of the ESPs — Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Sailthru — they're typically for e-commerce or they're for marketing emails. None of them were actually built for content-based emails, which you could also argue...
Well, Mailchimp — Mailchimp was like a mailing list manager first, right? And you would kind of put stuff on it, but it was really about your mailing list, and it really wasn't graphically compelling or any of that stuff. It kind of monkeyed around with this.
See what — yeah, I see what you did with the monkey, monkeying around there. Um, just throwing poop. So most of the email platforms are primarily for marketing, and if you look at the landscape, I think historically you would have people who posted content on their blog on WordPress, then they copy and paste it into Mailchimp, and if they wanted to monetize, there's like third parties for that, if they wanted a referral program, there's software for that, and it was just like a very convoluted system of piecing together six different things. So the value of beehiiv and what I saw at Morning Brew is like, if we can just bundle this all together, you can create a newsletter, you hit publish, it also goes to your website, it's SEO optimized. If you want to monetize, we have an ad network. If you want to grow faster, we have a recommendation network. We have a referral program. And so that's kind of how we got our start was just packaging and productizing what we built at Morning Brew. So any newsletter operator had access to those same tools.
Question. Did you kind of — when you started out, were you basically just saying, 'Here's what we do at Morning Brew, chunk, let's build that, we know how to do that'? Or did you already start to put some bells and whistles in there? You certainly put some in there last week with the announcement, but I mean, that first project — I mean, great time to go in stealth mode during 2020, right? That's a good time to be developing because like, what else are you going to do? But was it basically Morning Brew at that point? What were you going to say, Dan?
Was Substack even a factor at that point when you're ramping up?
Yeah. So, Substack launched about like four years before us. I think 2016, 2017. And so...
What it actually — that actually helped give me the motivation to build the company. I think most people would see that competition as a reason why not to go into that market. But at the time — and Substack has grown more advanced over time — but at the time, the common chatter on Twitter was that the product was terrible. There's no customization there. It's very limiting in what you can do. And then they raised a Series B. I think they raised at like a $65 million valuation. And I saw that as, I know what I built internally on Morning Brew is so much more powerful than what they built, but what they built is worth $65 million. And here I am on the sidelines as like an employee at Morning Brew. So I think that actually gave me a lot of motivation to say that there was a wedge in this market, that they were building something, but what I wanted to build was literally the exact roadmap that I know works because it worked for Morning Brew, and if it worked at Morning Brew, it should work for XYZ other newsletter or media company who wanted to use that software. So that was kind of the gap that I saw. They got a four-year head start on us, but we have caught up quite quickly. And I feel we're kind of even diverging now in terms of — I think they're trying to build a social media platform. We want to be tools and infrastructure to help support creators and publishers to build their own standalone business, not to intermediate between the content creator and their audience.
So to answer your question from the outset, what drew us to beehiiv was the sort of flexibility of monetization. You had a lot of ways — a lot of fortresses, a lot of ways to attack, I think is the saying. And one of them was, I mean, if you were a big — if you were Oliver Darcy or a big-name journalist, you could migrate to your own newsletter and accumulate a lot of subscribers right away who would pay based on your name, based on your skill set. I mean, a lot of these guys are good, too. We feel like we don't break a lot of huge scoops, but our background is analysis and good writing. And neither Dave nor I had huge names, although in niche circles we're respected. And we thought we could create in kind of a controlled circulation trade environment. You know, that's — we read trades like Variety, Deadline. Yeah, a lot of them. And we felt like, you know, specific groups of high-level decision makers will listen to us. It's not a mass audience, but it's, you know, a good one. And if you could sell sponsorship against that, you could have a business. You don't need to be viral. And I guess that flexibility, we didn't see that anywhere else. Were you designing for that kind of one-size-fits-all mindset, or how far into the sort of publishing model did you consider, I guess?
Yeah, pretty deep. I mean, to even just compare and contrast Substack for a second, I can dovetail more into like our vision here. I think the Amazon vs. Shopify analogy holds up pretty well, where at Amazon there's millions of third-party sellers, but no one actually knows them. You kind of just go to amazon.com or the Amazon app. Amazon collects a lot of data on the customer, passes very little back to the merchant. It shows up in an Amazon box. Amazon owns that entire customer relationship. I view Substack and the ecosystem they've built very similar. You go to the Substack app, they try to convert your readers into their users to download the app. They've intermediated, they withhold data. And even just in the verbiage, like 'you launch a Substack' or 'sign up to my Substack.' We are the antithesis of that. Like for the Shopify analogy, they have millions of merchants that have built their own storefronts that are custom branded. You would have no idea that they're even built on Shopify. And that is how I want us to be for content. We should be the tools and infrastructure that's operating in the background to make it possible for Oliver Darcy to leave CNN and stand up his own media company. That's not a beehiiv or a Substack, but it is Status News and it's his own brand and it's totally built around what he wants to build, and we should provide the infrastructure and the flexibility to make that possible. So I think philosophically they're very different. From a business model perspective, we are flat-rate SaaS. We don't take a cut of revenue, and I think that caps a lot of publishers and content creators, where you are paying a fee, and fees typically only go up because there's only one way for them to increase revenue, and that's increasing that take rate. We don't take a take rate or fee from any subscription revenue, any product revenue, or anything. So I think it's a better business model for publishers, and then there's just like the flexibility we have. We are building enterprise-level software. A lot of our largest users, whether it's Time and TechCrunch and Newsweek and Sinclair, come from very enterprise-level solutions that we built from our experience at Morning Brew, and we're making it accessible to like the consumer as well at like a consumer-accessible pricing. So that's where the real innovation I think has been, and I think just adding that flexibility where you can build the business that you want is where our users really thrive.
So in terms of the new stuff, community is an interesting choice. So it is absolutely a challenge to build community on the existing gigantic platforms if you're trying to start small, right? But you guys are saying don't go into the wilds of TikTok and YouTube. Let us build you something that you control and that's your space. And I find that a really interesting approach, a way to think through how do I connect and stay engaged with, beyond the newsletter, the people that are interested in what we have to say. Talk about that.
Yeah, it might help just quickly to run through the evolution. We started with newsletters. We launched websites as well. People wanted a place to host their newsletter. You kind of need a place for people to sign up to the newsletter. So, we launched a website builder where you can build your own website. Once we launched that, people wanted more. They're like, 'Okay, now that I have this website, I want to sell something,' whether it's products or templates or guides. So, last November, we launched digital products. So, people are selling their expertise, whether it's a how-to get started with ChatGPT to here's my cooking guides, but like you can sell whatever your expertise is. Three months ago, we launched podcasts. You can host, distribute, and monetize your podcast directly on beehiiv. And then what we launched last week is community. And the thesis there is the most successful publishers and content creators are multi-channel now. And going back to what the ecosystem used to look like, you used to have to piece together five or six different pieces of software to get anything done. And then you have different data silos. Your website data lives over here. Your newsletter data lives over here. Your community's over here. I think most publishers don't want to deal with that. I think having it all consolidated into a single platform is much more user-friendly, and there's a lot of benefits we get from that. So the community angle is now — I'll use my newsletter as an example. I send a newsletter every Tuesday to 130,000 founders and startup people. It's called Big Desk Energy. It's all about entrepreneurship, basically, and how I build the company. I have so many ambitious founders in that list that I've met offhand, and they would benefit from getting to know each other, but there's not a space for them to actually connect. And that's where it flips from me being the only one who can create value in this ecosystem, which is me sending the newsletter every Tuesday, to me launching a community where there's value just from people getting to chat and meet each other and learn from one another outside of just me. So, that's kind of where I see the community angle. I'd push back and disagree. We're not saying don't use TikTok or Instagram or YouTube. I think those channels are great for distribution. I think there's a lot of value. There's like, you know, hundreds of millions of users there. I frequently post on X and LinkedIn, and like I utilize those platforms as well, but I think there's something about an algorithmically driven platform where there's no guarantee of reaching your audience versus a newsletter where you own that audience and that distribution reliably, and a community that also you can reach those people as well. So I think that's kind of how we differ and think about the ecosystem.
Well, you are the best. One thing I find energizing and inspiring is the level of iteration on the platform. I mean, it's grown tremendously just in the 18 months we've been on it, but for folks like us, it's a little hard to keep up sometimes. Some of the product tutorials are for stuff that was, you know, a couple of iterations ago. I guess I'm boggled a little bit, but how big is your technology staff? How are you moving so fast? And are you challenged with bringing your user base to use some of these new tools?
Yeah, I think you're hitting on the right question. And it's not just you guys. I think like most people actually struggle to keep up with how fast that we move. And the Achilles' heel of launching a few updates every week is that videos and tutorials do fall out of date. We actually just made a hire this week, and that should change pretty quickly. But yeah, we're aware of that gap and trying to fill that pretty quickly.
Hey, the guy that does the Asian chef — I don't know his name — but he goes really fast. I want him to slow down a little bit.
Yeah. Yeah. I'll let him — I'll relay to him to go a little bit slower. That's great feedback for us. Yes, we need to invest a lot more in what we call user education and tutorials.
To put the video on X.5 — I guess you could do that, right, Dave? Audio.
Yeah. So our team, our engineering, product, design team is probably like 40%, 40-50% of the company. It's definitely the biggest part of the company. Technically, how we've been able to do it, we have a lot of full-stack engineers that can do front-end and back-end and QA and a little bit of design. So, we're able to move quickly there. I think a lot of it just comes from the DNA of when we first launched. I think David asked this question way back when — I think you both asked a question at the same time, so I didn't answer David's — but when we initially launched the business, we were the most nascent platform in a sea of Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, like all of these competitors who had been in business for 10-plus years and had a very robust platform. We had built this over the course of 10 months and offered maybe 5% of what all these other platforms offered. And so I can do my best job to build hype and sell people on trying the platform, they'd very quickly realize that we didn't offer 90% of the things that the other platforms offered. And so the name of the game for us was how do we ship as quickly as possible to bridge the gap and make it so our users don't churn and leave the platform. And once we built that muscle of product velocity, we just never stopped. It became like a core competency of the company. And we're still shipping multiple updates every single week. I think the space is evolving a ton. It's important to listen to our users. We've created so many superfans of people complaining to me on X about a feature that sucks and then us pushing out an update two hours later to fix it, and they're a fan for life. And I think being able to actually listen to our users has been like one of our biggest advantages. That being said, I think we've met — especially with this last event last week — I think we've met a point of maturation where we aren't reaching for the next big product update. I think we have everything from newsletter, website, podcast, community, products. Like that's a very strong foundation and I think serves 99% of our users' use cases. Now it's just can we make all of those 10 times better? And can we make the product experience easier? Can we make it easier to adopt those features? Can we provide the right resources so they can use them seamlessly? And our guys speak slower so everyone understands what's going on. So that's kind of where we are now as a business. Like after that event last week, it really is around maturation and making it best-in-class.
So that's kind of interesting about where you could even go, because it does feel like it's obviously a much fuller suite. I mean, the programmatic stuff I find interesting. The AI tool is really — I was just noodling around with ChatGPT's lower reaches and finding all these apps I could connect into my ChatGPT subscription if I wanted to. And I was like, well, I'll do it with Zoom, but well, I'm sure not doing my finances with that. But I guess this means you guys have a front end. How would I take advantage of a copilot that you now have built in with that MCP to further supercharge newsletter awesomeness?
Yeah, I think so. Three months ago we launched an MCP which allows you to connect your beehiiv account to ChatGPT or Claude. And so the consumer trend there is a lot of people are using, let's say, Claude or ChatGPT to do daily work, whether it's can you recap this meeting, can you help me understand my business, like can you connect to Slack and then Zoom and Google Calendar. And so more and more work is happening in these like AI clients, and giving Claude access to your beehiiv account allows you to, 'Hey, who are my most engaged readers?' Or 'I'm going to launch an IRL event in a month. Who should I create a segment to send that I think is like the most likely to come because they've engaged with all of my content?' Or 'Where am I missing opportunities to monetize?' Like whatever you want to ask, you can view ChatGPT or Claude, who has like the power of indexing the entire internet. And by giving it access to your beehiiv account, it knows all of your posts, your content, your automations, your segments. So, it's just like an assistant essentially that you can use like on steroids. The MCP's probably been the highest-NPS thing we've ever launched. Like people who have adopted Claude and ChatGPT to do more of their work, having access to your beehiiv account has like totally transformed their workflows. A super example is you can create content tags on your posts that help it index on search and also when people go to your website to know like what are the different types of stories that you're writing. I got lazy and forgot to add content tags a year and a half ago. And so I have 65 posts that don't have a content tag. It would have taken me an hour and a half to go through each of those 65 and assign it a tag. But I asked Claude, I was like, 'Hey, look at the posts that do have a tag. Categorize, understand why — like what I wrote about and why I marked it with a specific tag — and then take the 65 that don't have one and just assign a tag to all of them.' And it did it in three minutes. So like just one stupid example of like it just helps to have these AI agents doing work on your behalf of work that I otherwise would not have done. What we launched last week is called Copilot, and it is basically everything I just described but in-app. So rather than using it in Claude, it's directly in beehiiv. It knows what page you're looking at. You could be looking at a dashboard and be like, 'Can you help me make sense of this? Like what are the questions I should be asking?' and it understands your business and can kind of do that analysis for you. So I think broadly the way that I think of AI is a lot of content creators and publishers spend X amount of time creating content and a lot of time doing the admin work around their business. We think AI can actually invert that, where you're spending more of your time focusing on content and the things that matter, and you can augment a lot of these admin tasks.
I feel like that guy in that movie Limitless. I think it was Bradley Cooper who kind of staggers around trying to get through life, and they give him this drug that allows him to use the full potential of his brain. I think we use...
Probably like 5% of your capabilities at this point, Tyler. And we stagger around. I just want to emphasize, we stagger around a lot.
What's funny about that is that is an interesting... we keep building new things because a lot of our customers come to us asking us to build these new things and we solve problems for them. And I actually think more than an email platform, we are an engine to solve people's problems. They come to us, they know we can ship good features and we can and deliver. But yeah, you get into this interesting paradigm where people feel like, hey, I'm using one of the 30 things that are in this platform and they almost feel like it's not as much, even though we haven't raised prices in three years. They're like, I feel like I'm paying for something although I'm only using a fraction of it. And I think that is an interesting paradigm from my lens of how I have to manage expectations and how we communicate the different value of the platform.
Well, it feels like you're so good at programmatic advertising that if you're just a little bit diligent and open-minded, even with a small audience, you can monetize your way to flat pretty easily. And I wonder how many people know that.
That's our north star. It's how many users are actually generating more revenue on the platform, whether it's ads, subscriptions, products, than they're paying us. Because if you're paying us $100 a month, but you're making $1,000 a month, it's a pretty good trade. And I don't think many people are going to turn off that platform. So yeah, monetization's a huge proponent of how we continue to grow.
I'm really curious. The other thing, I guess you got the WYSIWYG, you got the co-pilot programmatic. What's the step up though here? Because you could, since we came on, you know, so-and-so wants to advertise and you're in the list here. Is this good? Is this to further automate it? It automatically places it within a window and we don't even have to go through that process? Or how does that work with whitelists and blacklists and all that?
Yeah. So the way that the ad network works today, and previous to programmatic ads, is a lot of our users want full control and choice over what advertisers go live in their newsletter. And so they want to monetize this newsletter. They type backslash ads and they can see a portfolio of sponsors that are available to them at different rates of pay and different industries. And you can choose, you want the AG1 ad, and we usually have a few options of creative. You can say, I like this one wording and framing better than this one, and you drop it in your newsletter. So in fact, it's like two or three clicks, but you can choose your sponsor and you get paid out a few weeks later. Even though that sounds super intuitive, as we've gotten larger publishers onto the platform, a lot of them work in this programmatic world where they separate editorial from monetization and they don't want the people in the newsletter choosing which advertiser to run because it's like just not...
And don't be doing that. I mean, journalist monetizing is an adventure. There's no doubt about that. So you're trying to automate some of that and kind of take it out of as much as they want to take it out of there.
So programmatic came primarily for our enterprise segment of like the Times and TechCrunches of the world who do separate their journalists from the monetization angle and they just want a programmatic ad block that sits in their newsletter and they do allow list or block list and someone has control over that. Yes, we will automatically fill that with the most relevant ad.
One of, we met an interesting guy up here at an event we were recently at, Rick Ellis, who was going through considerable pain at the time transitioning from Substack to beehiiv, but he wasn't looking back. He was pretty convinced it was the right move and I think he remains so. Are you guys reaching out to folks and coaching and recruiting, or are they stumbling on this themselves? Or what can you tell us that doesn't get you in trouble?
Nothing will get me in trouble. We, I mean, we have like a growth...
He's a founder. He can do whatever he wants.
I'm just saying his mother's going, Tyler Horatio Dink. Let's just talk, sir. You know, but anyway...
I was, no, nothing on this topic will get me in trouble, to clarify. Okay. We...
Yeah, I mean, we have a marketing growth team that's focused on like building different campaigns and being able to communicate why our platform is the better platform for a lot of these writers and journalists. We don't really have a concerted effort around poaching writers from any given platform. Like, we don't have an internal effort of like, here's the 500 best Substack writers and like we should convince them to use our platform. We're not doing cold outreach there.
The same way I was actually asked on a podcast yesterday because we've had a lot of journalists leave large legacy media companies to go independent and launch on our platform. And like we also don't, even though this is like, this was Substack's initial strategy eight years ago was let's just poach all the biggest writers at the New York Times and The Athletic because that media likes to write about media. We get all of their best writers, then they, you know, they'll write about it and like that becomes like the great migration from legacy media to independent and that is how Substack built the name for themselves. We don't poach, like especially like a lot of those legacy media companies are our users as well. It's like typically they come to us, like we've planted our flag as a landing spot for independent journalists. We have something called the beehiiv Media Collective where we cover their health insurance, some legal coverage. We give them Getty Images. We waive the fees for the platform. So we make it a very nice landing spot for them, but it's usually a pull versus a push. Like we aren't reaching out to these newsrooms and convincing them to go independent. They know where to find us and typically come reach out to us.
Well, and actually the reality is they're often given the opportunity to become independent. But whether they like it or not, it's like you have a new career opportunity presented to you by your now former employer, you know, so you can go wild. But I do think what's interesting about this, and one of the things we were going to get into briefly, was a bunch more layoffs at ESPN of notable on-screen personalities who absolutely should be doing deals with people like you, with a podcast, with a newsletter if they've got that background, and a lot of them do, you know, to have a broader reach. I mean, this feels like an era of, you know, the printing press returning to, you know, the Ben Franklin days when it's just a guy and his means of output, you know, writing Poor Richard's Almanac or in this case, Poor Dan's Almanac, Poor Daniels. I mean, it feels like it's that time.
He wasn't poor and neither are you, but I'm just saying. But the point is that it's the smaller operators that have a way to monetize, reach an audience, distribute, produce, and all the rest.
I have a question, and this is for you, Dave. Who was the guy at ESPN? He's doing a show and he finds out he's fired. Who was that? Do you know?
Was it Ravich? Karl Ravech? I think Karl Ravech was the guy this last week. I mean, one of the things that I like about this life is that unless I get this note from Tyler, you got to go. You got to go to Substack. Just get your stuff and go. I don't care where you go. But really, I could just set up somewhere else, it maybe wouldn't be as good. You're never worried that one email you're going to get is just going to ruin your life. It's an encouraging, inspiring feeling to...
Totally get that. And Tyler, what are you seeing about this shift? Because you know the big monoliths are carving off stuff. They're splitting up, but they're fracturing and the people are getting, particularly younger audiences are getting their news. They're getting their information from a wider array of sources from TikTok on up. As you mentioned, you know, don't give up on TikTok just because you can't dance. But it feels like you're kind of hitting a moment. Is that accurate?
Yeah. I posted on X the other week that I think the creator economy is the future of media and I think you're seeing it in all sorts of facets. Whether it's legacy media getting smaller, whether it's a lot of the top talent from legacy media going independent, and I'd consider them broadly a creator. Whether it's the growth that you're seeing, like the explosive growth on all of these channels and platforms from YouTube to Instagram to TikTok. Whether it's the box office and seeing some of these hits that are made for less than a million dollars, but they have a creator, director, and fan base behind it putting up like a 300x ROI. That, yeah, I think and hopefully beehiiv plays a small part in that. And what we are doing is making it easier. We have a very generous free plan. You can start it as a side project. And there's so many case studies where someone signed up, created a newsletter, turned into a couple hundred dollars a week, which turned into a couple thousand dollars a week, which turned into their full-time job, which turned into them then hiring a team to build more, to create more content and build a business around it. And I think it's very freeing and exciting to be able to create content on your own terms. And I think there are tools like ours that make it easier and more possible. Again, like what YouTube did for video and monetizing video is what we're trying to do for newsletters and eventually podcasts as well. But to have a newsletter, send it to 10,000 people and not need to know a single person at HubSpot, but have HubSpot pay you a $5 CPC, like that's very democratizing to be able to actually generate real money on the internet. And hopefully that kicks off that flywheel.
