At Morning Brew, I was naive but willing to out-hustle anyone and learn anything. So I joined Morning Brew without knowing a thing about email. I taught myself. I took meetings all day with people who were at larger media companies that were doing email really well. And I taught myself to hustle and was able to build something. And then I think the parallels between Morning Brew and beehiiv are pretty transparent and obvious, right? Like what we built at Morning Brew is really what we're trying to democratize here at beehiiv. So I think to the people who are thinking about building and launching something, it is what is like the value that you can provide, whether it's something you've done at a previous job or just like a hobby and passion that you are very passionate and knowledgeable about, I think is where I'd start.
Hello and welcome to the Exponential Scale podcast. This is the show where we talk about how tiny teams with big ambitions are doing more with less, scaling smarter, not harder, and building big businesses with teams that you can fit around a dinner table. So, before we jump in, I have a really exciting guest. I'm excited for many reasons, and I want to share a little bit of a personal connection to our guest here, Tyler Denk. One that I actually didn't even know I had, because a long time ago we used to run this morning demo event series called Tech Breakfast, where we would just get together. It was almost exactly like what it sounded like. We would get together in the morning and we would see cool companies demoing cool things.
That's pretty cool because I was working on a software company myself and I had moved from Boston to Baltimore. Anyway, long story, I didn't know anybody in the tech scene and I didn't know what people were doing. And I saw a lot of PowerPoint, but I really wanted to see what people were doing, and the demo thing became alive. And I was talking to a mutual friend of ours and he said, yeah, I said, oh, I'm using beehiiv. I use beehiiv as our newsletter platform for Exponential Scale and our Scalabra audience. I was just talking about it to one of my colleagues and he said, oh yeah, didn't you know that the founder, Tyler, he presented at a Tech Breakfast a long time ago? I'm like, what? And I didn't realize that. So the connection goes a long way. And for those of you that aren't aware, we're going to have Tyler introduce himself shortly and talk a little bit about beehiiv. But Tyler has been on a lot of podcasts as well, so you can hear a lot of the story of beehiiv, its founding. He's been on My First Million, Newsletter Operator, The Pomp Podcast, World of Dasp, Professor G Pod, The Biography, This Week in Startups, Format, Behind the Brand twice, and about 40 others. And Tyler, I did the research, so I'm happy to share it with you.
Actually, my agents did the research and got that full list as well as a summary of all those takeaways. So I will link to those actually in the show notes because I have no problem telling other people where to go listen. And also, beehiiv has a great blog and they published a story in four parts of beehiiv's founding and their growth and their origin story, and talk about the origins of how Tyler helped Morning Brew scale before their $75 million acquisition, why email is beating social, how beehiiv went from zero to a $250 million valuation in just three and a half years, and what it's like to raise venture funding while also grieving the loss of a co-founder. So there's a whole story there as well. And beehiiv, as mentioned, already documented that story. So we're going to cover new ground on this podcast while going over some of that stuff for those of you that may be hearing this for the first time and get a little bit of that. And we're going to go somewhere where these conversations didn't go, and that is how does Tyler actually think about team size and leverage. And we're recording this podcast before he's having an all-hands meeting, which is kind of interesting timing because you're getting together with all those people. So where does beehiiv go from here, and how is Tyler building this organization with a team and strong product and world-class leverage? So Tyler, thank you so much for joining us, and you know, introduce yourself a little bit and maybe a fun fact that people may not have heard on any of those other podcasts.
Yeah, you're putting me on the spot on the fun fact. Let me, I'll think on that for a sec. I also think the timing is interesting with this all-hands coming up because I'm going to introduce something around AI in this all-hands that we have in 60 minutes, which is I think going to intertwine with a lot of the conversation here and what you have been covering with a lot of these smaller teams doing more with less. And so we'll get into like how lean we are, but we are trying to take the next step in being able to do more of that. But yeah, to quick intro: previously was the second employee at Morning Brew. I helped, I led product, engineering, and growth there. Helped grow that through the acquisition in 2020 by Business Insider. Did a quick stint at YouTube Music and then launched beehiiv in 2021. beehiiv is what we call now the operating system for the content economy. It's a newsletter-first platform, but we also have websites. You can sell digital products, you can sell digital subscriptions. We have an ad network with Fortune 500 advertisers like Nike and Netflix. And so we're trying to empower content creation at scale where users and large publishers can grow and monetize their content on the internet, kind of away from algorithmic feeds like social media. And yeah, we're four years in. We have 110 employees. We did about $30 million in revenue last year in our fourth year, projected $50 million this year. So it's kind of like a TL;DR of where we are.
Yeah, I was trying to do the mental math on revenue per employee in that real quick, but that sounds, you know, fantastic. And, you know, one of the reasons why I keep coming back to newsletters, which is interesting. We were in this sort of maybe post-social media era. It's kind of hard to tell what era exactly we're in, but there's one thing about, you know, having an audience and another thing about developing a relationship in some way, and of course owning your audience, which is one of the things I really like about newsletters and email that you don't have when you're posting things in Facebook groups and, you know, on Twitter streams and things like that. X, I should say. And I think that's one of the most interesting things is that that hasn't really gotten a lot of fanfare is that the newsletter and, you know, this sort of building this audience has become really one of the most powerful distribution channels that a small team can own, not only because email's trending, but because it never really stopped working. You know, everybody just forgot for a few years while they were chasing the algorithm, and, you know, the highest-leverage operators really figured this out early. You know, you can be one founder, have one list, one direct line to the exact people you want to hear from. No platform middleman, no feed optimization, no pay-to-reach-your-audience tax. You own the list. And actually, for those of you that might know, who've been following Scalabra early, we were originally on Substack and actually moved off the Substack platform because it started to feel a little too social networking for me. I started to feel like I might actually lose my audience in many ways. So that's part of the reason why I do like, you know, I'm not just interviewing Tyler because, you know, he's making the rounds. I really do like Tyler and what he's doing and the beehiiv platform and those who are trying to not just grow, but monetize. It sounds like a lot of the direction that beehiiv is going is increasing that monetization. One thing Tyler didn't mention is he has his own newsletter as well, Big Desk Energy, that I've subscribed to. And he kind of got me early because there was this productization hook that you had where it was this $10 how-to-build-a-newsletter thing, and I'm like, I got to do this. And I think I was one of your first clicks in there, and you grew that even on that was like revenue went from zero to $10K or $15K in hours. So, you know, I think maybe let's start there a little bit with the insight. Where did this come from? Like the newsletter space has been around for a while. You know, there were email providers have been doing things, whether it's the old MailerLite or Kit or, you know, even Mailchimp and all that. What was the origin story? What sort of pushed you from Morning Brew to decide that, hey, this is something that I really need to really get into and innovate in this area?
Yeah, well, I think Morning Brew was a pretty eye-opening experience. When I joined as the second employee, we had one advertiser, it was Discover, and they paid us about $4,000 per email that we sent. And at the time, we had about 100,000 readers. And it was just such a mind-blowing concept of like I saw behind the scenes the work put into it. We had one writer, we had one seller, I was doing like the engineering and product work. We wrote the newsletter, we hit send, we made $4,000. And then as you fast forward and we grew to 1 million, 2 million, 3 million readers, that same advertising spot became Visa and Apple, and they were paying us $50,000 per send. And at that time, we also were able to diversify and not just have a single sponsor per newsletter, but we had a secondary and tertiary sponsor. So any given day, the work, again, if you fast forward through those three years, the work to create the newsletter was kind of the same. We added a few writers, we updated the style, but it was still 5 to 6 hours of putting the newsletter together, but the output went from $4,000 a day to $80,000 a day. And so you start to see the dynamics of how profitable an email newsletter can be. So that was one thing that I think really jumped out. Two, I think during this time we saw what Facebook did in 2018 to publishers, right? So Facebook used to be a place where they would encourage brands and publishers to grow their Facebook likes. And the thinking was if you had 100,000 likes on Facebook, and I'm dating myself, you know, 8, 10 years now, but if you had 100,000 likes on Facebook, then roughly 100,000 people should see the content that you publish. And all of these publishers also monetize on their website. And so the thinking was you post on Facebook, 100,000 people see it, they click through to this article, and using the traffic that you're driving to this article, you make money with Google AdSense for all of like the banner ads. Then they adopted Twitter, and then they obviously have always been very dependent on Google for search. And slowly but surely, Facebook in 2018 changed their algorithm and made it so they actually deprioritized content from brands and publishers. So those 100,000 likes that you have are now kind of useless, and you can't reach that audience anymore on Facebook. In 2022, Twitter deprioritized external links, and so you can't post links as a publisher on Twitter and expect to get that same traffic. And then in 2024, Google introduced AI summaries, and a lot of that search traffic also dissipated. And so now as a publisher or content creator, those channels that you did depend on are no longer there to drive traffic. But the publishers that did very well in that time, Morning Brew, The Skimm, Axios, Politico, Puck, all of these companies, the thing that they have in common is they're email-first. And so they've already shifted from the world of getting a million anonymous page views to having a million subscribers that they know exactly who they are, what content they like, what they're clicking on, and when they want to reach them, they have an email to actually get in front of them. And so I think the combination of obviously my experience at Morning Brew and this macro trend of the unreliability of these large tech platforms for driving distribution for content just paved the way for what we're now seeing in like this newsletter explosion, where everyone from hobbyists to journalists to massive publishers and even like SaaS brands who are investing in newsletters to be able to reach their audience and their customers. So that's kind of like what I've been seeing over the past few years.
Yeah, that's really interesting. That last point hits home. Many folks know that I write for Forbes as one of the AI contributors. We actually had an all-hands meeting because traffic is actually on the decline even for major publishers. Hard to get attention. But if you can build a relationship, you can maintain it. You're also mentioning journalists getting into it. There was a big layoff spree at Washington Post, and the first thing that a lot of people say is like, okay, I'm going to become independent. I'm just going to build my own audience. I don't need a publisher anymore. So it's kind of interesting how those dynamics are changing, and that might be for an additional podcast later. We'll talk about that. But now, let's think about leverage, because that's what I know our audience wants to know. beehiiv is growing and raised some significant amount of money, and the company's valuation now, it's over $250 million. I don't know what the latest valuation is, in just three and a half years. And a lot of companies at this stage, they look at rapidly growing team size and sort of trying to flood the field and, you know, just go out there and try to dominate that way. But I'm kind of curious as to your perspective. You know, what does the team look like right now? How are you looking at expansion? Is staying lean a deliberate choice? When you were early, you were small and lean, but I really want to know what kind of the pressures or direction you're facing on sort of that leverage perspective.
Yeah, the only pressure I think we feel isn't really external from like investors and other shareholders. It really is the fact that we're an unprofitable startup, and unprofitable startups on this VC-backed flywheel, there's only one thing to do: it's grow as quickly as possible, burn money, and then raise more money, and that is like kind of the traditional Silicon Valley playbook. I think there are ways to curb that and stop that proliferation of just spending money to raise more money. I think that is what I am personally interested in. Like we just raised a Series B in 2024, so actually about two years ago. We have $30 million in the bank. We feel good. Is there a way that we can close the gap and continue to grow while being less and less unprofitable to eventually obviously reach profitability and not be dependent on venture dollars? And I do think we are living in a rare time where with the proliferation of these AI tools that I think were okay at best like two years ago to like now getting very good, being able to do things autonomously. Like I almost view it as like, you know, there was work done before computers were mainstream, and, you know, being an accountant and having to do all of that type of work prior to Excel was probably very difficult and timely, and computers made that much easier. And so where else in our company today are people doing things where there's a limit to how much output they can have because they aren't yet using and adopting AI to its fullest capabilities? And how can we actually rewire the team and train employees to be able to do 2, 3, 4x more using AI? And so that's kind of like what we are prioritizing right now. I think at the rate that we're growing, there's always pressure to grow faster. We're in like a very competitive industry, and so, you know, we could take the stance of we want profitability. We could stop spending so much money. We could stop hiring, and we can actually shift towards profitability. I think what most founders would relate to is the uncertainty around taking your foot off the gas in a very competitive industry could mean like, yes, you're going for profitability, but all of the other companies are out-innovating you, and you actually aren't going to be there for the long run. So I don't think that's an option. So I think adopting AI and being able to extract more output per employee is really the only path forward.
Yeah. Well, that definitely is what we talk about. You know, trying to extract the most leverage you can per person. It is usually the sort of Silicon Valley trade-off of growth versus profit, which for a lot of founders seems a little odd because it's strange that you have to sacrifice growth for profit. I think part of it may come down to power law effects, which is what you're talking about, which is that unless you're number one or number two, like the number three through number 10 player just have such a little share of the market that it makes it hard to, you know, even grow at all or grow in a weird way. Although we've had some really interesting interviews with folks who operate in highly competitive spaces where they're growing very rapidly and linearly without that. So what we call it is there may be a third way. You know, I think AI and automation, to your point, the more that we leverage to multiply capabilities, the more that we'll be able to extract value without necessarily having to do the trade-off. But I encourage our listeners to listen to those things. I think the question for you is about like the operating model. You know, when you're thinking internally now about leveraging more AI and automation to what I call multiply you, right? We usually think of hiring as adding, we add people, or subtracting, getting rid of people, but really AI and automation is about multiplying, keeping your people but multiplying their output. So can you think about what tools, what systems, what policies, what processes are you putting into place internally that is helping you optimize and grow the output per person for yourself and possibly for your customers as well?
Well, yeah, I think we're still pretty early in this. We're like in the stage of building champions in the sense that we just started a few weeks ago doing like AI show-and-tells every week, which is, I mean, there's obviously, I'd say the engineering team obviously has adopted AI the most and the most widespread. And it started with one or two engineers using Cursor or Claude Code. And then once you start to see that they're pushing out five pull requests a day and everyone else is doing one, there's kind of like that internal pressure that like you have to learn how to adopt and leverage AI while coding to keep up with the rest of the team and the expectations. So the engineers were all very early adopters. I'd say it's pretty spread through the rest of the team of some people have adopted these different AI tools, whether it's like Claude Cowork, Claude Code, using ChatGPT for different workflows, other AI like CRM and different tools there. I think it's pretty sparse in like we have champions on different teams that are using it, but it hasn't really been pushed by me or the company to really proliferate that. And so that's kind of the stage that we're entering now is how do we create this culture, and we're doing it by creating like a dedicated AI channel where every team has to have at least one person that is going to be the AI champion on the team. And to be a part of this like quote-unquote club, they have to post and share one new automation or one new task that they did with AI every single week, obviously related to work. The thinking is once they see that they can automate seven of their 15 tasks, they'll be able to reallocate time to do other tasks. It'll unlock that like multiplying effect that you mentioned. And once you have one or two people on a team that have kind of seen the light and are able to do that, it'll become pretty clear that they are outperforming the others in a sense that the others now have to adopt that tech. And now we have someone on the team that can teach them how they're doing all of these different automations and shortcuts. And so we're trying to take like a bottom-up approach to getting champions and doing it. I do think it is difficult because like to your point, we actually have an incredibly talented team. We aren't doing it from a place of we are short on cash and want to remove headcount. We want to keep headcount. We want to expand what our current headcount is doing, and we want to prevent future headcount. I think that's important. Every quarter there's like another wave of headcount requests, and I think there has to be the question of, did you already try automating what you want to hire or like what this person to do? And most of the time it's like we already have two or three of these people on the team, they want a fourth or a fifth, and like are the existing three leveraging AI in their day-to-day? Because if not, it's like doing a job without a computer. Like you actually aren't leveraging all of the tools that are available in the field today. And until you've checked that box and either determined that the current tools aren't at the capacity or level of output to do some of these like more complex tasks per se with like the level of accuracy that we need, or it's just like not the right skill set to be able to do that, like then I think hiring becomes like on the table. But I think we need to start running those checks to prevent future hiring if we ever want to like flatten the curve of hiring to get closer to profitability.
Yeah. For those of you that aren't listening to this podcast, not watching, I'm like nodding my head vigorously here in part because that's this whole mantra here. It's called leverage before labor, which is the idea that it's not about non-hiring, it's not about firing, it's about before you make the hire, can you just maximize the output using the tools that we have? And I agree with you, a lot of it is not a technology gap per se. I mean, people do need to learn skills, but this stuff is like basically like speaking English. I mean, if you can talk, you can do a lot of the AI stuff now. So really the limiting factor for a lot of the stuff is creativity, strangely enough. And just thinking beyond the way that you're doing things now, or maybe even thinking too like, well, I do A, so therefore I need machine to do A, and therefore I will get the benefit that I usually get from A. It's like, well, maybe machine shouldn't do A. Maybe machine should do B, C, and D, the things you could never have done, you know. And so a lot of it is the creativity, which is ironic because this may actually be the time to bring back the old demo event. People just need to see what other people are doing, whether it's internally or externally. So that's another story for another time.
That's why, yeah, that's why I brought the AI show-and-tell to life, and that's why we're doing that weekly. And actually, right before I joined, because we did an AI show-and-tell so far, and I think it skewed very technical. We had an engineer do it, and he was doing stuff in the command line, and I think that turns off half the company that's not technical. And so there's a task that I do every Friday or Thursday this week before all-hands, which takes me like 15 minutes to organize the all-hands sheet and color code it and do a few other things. And it's not like the end of the world. It takes me 15 minutes, but it's 15 minutes I'm actually not paying attention to the meeting before all-hands because I'm like doing that and multitasking. So I did a screen share right before this because I know I have this meeting before all-hands, and I showed exactly how I use Claude Cowork to describe, here's the sheet, I want you to organize it in this way and color code it this way. And I went to eat breakfast. I came back and it was done. I have a recording of that. And so I think there is a lot of the show-and-tell aspect for like these, not laggards, but the people who are less technical, because I think AI comes off as like a very technical thing. But yeah, I totally agree with that.
Well, great. Well, show-and-tell's coming back to life. That is for sure. So let's focus a little more about beehiiv and kind of the enablement of what's happening now in this ecosystem. I think, you know, AI is really, as we mentioned, rapidly changing what a one or two-person team can now do, can now produce. So how are you seeing from your own, because now I don't remember how many beehiiv customers there are and how many newsletters and maybe how much visibility you have into how many people are using beehiiv as their like business, as their primary content business. So what are you seeing some of the best beehiiv operators doing? And, you know, not just to kind of write and communicate, but to build a business that they possibly couldn't do a couple years ago.
Yeah. I mean, I was even just in London last week, and we had a few different events there, and a lot of our beehiiv users showed up. And one of them started doing like strategy consulting a few years ago and launched a newsletter on the side. Now has 120,000 subscribers, has a full business. It's his full-time job. And so I actually do think the power of kind of what I discovered with my time at Morning Brew in terms of growing an audience, finding ways to monetize that audience. The larger you grow, obviously the more revenue you can generate from ads. You can do paid subscriptions if you're providing that value. You hinted earlier at my digital product, my $10 digital product. Made $10,000 on that. And all I did was I had an existing deck that I had built for like a previous presentation. I uploaded it to beehiiv. I put it behind a paywall and I made it $10 and I put it in my newsletter and I made a thousand sales. And so the ways that we are helping content creators and journalists and media companies monetize and be able to extract revenue from their audience, I think is really like the innovation that we're trying to push forward. There isn't just one way to monetize. I think two decades ago it was all digital advertising, and then with the launch of Substack, they really pushed a very opinionated stance of, oh, it's paid subscriptions or nothing, like that is the proper way of how you should monetize this content. And I think what we are trying to show is it could be paid subscriptions, it could be sponsorships, it could be digital products, it can be really anything. And so allowing content creators to lean into what they do best and how they can extract revenue from their audience, I think will yield the best results. So yeah, we see tons of one-person teams that are on our enterprise plans and are making millions of dollars in revenue from some combination of sponsorships and digital products and all of the above. A lot of them are leveraging AI. We have an AI website builder, and so it's getting better daily. We're like pushing out updates to it like several times a day. The goal there is if you, and I think websites are coming back is like another theme, especially with the age of like AEO and GEO. I think having premium content on your website that these different LLMs can scrape and leverage helps you get more exposure in the LLM. And so yeah, I think like what was old is new again in the sense that email and websites I think are really valuable in this stage that we are, and hopefully we can help empower all of that.
Yeah, it's really interesting. Well, from your insights, you know, attention is one of the hardest things to get right now because there's so much content, there's so many newsletters. But you're mentioning, you said some people have been able to be really successful and get 100,000, 200,000 subscribers. What are you seeing in sort of this modern age or this sort of today's age of just the proliferation of content? What are some of those successful people doing to grow possibly from not having any audience at all?
all to building something significant?
Yeah, I think a lot of it is like being paved by people that can show that it's possible. And so when you see Ben Thompson at Stratechery build a $5 million a year business more or less by himself through a three times a week newsletter, that kind of shows what is possible by creating very premium content and putting it behind a paywall. When you see these other individual content creators who are building multi-million dollar businesses, like you can kind of take from the playbooks of other people who are doing it well. And I think because of the proliferation of the creator economy, there's just a lot more case studies to study and understand how you can take with something you like and leave something you don't like, but build your own path forward. I think the tools behind it, right? Like whether it's Substack or beehiiv or a lot of these other platforms. Back when I was at Morning Brew, we had our own custom website. We had to use Mailchimp and then like another ESP. We built our own referral program. We had to do our own ad sales. We had to set up our own paywalls. Like that infrastructure was so tedious and not available to people who weren't technical that it prevented people from being able to launch their own strategy or their own newsletter just because the tech stack was so not consolidated. And so I think platforms like beehiiv definitely play a large part in like being able to make this more readily available to people. And then obviously AI plays a big part as well. You kind of have like there's not a one-size-fits-all for creating content. And so if you are recording a podcast, then you have to like chop it up and put it into smaller video formats, and then you have to post on TikTok and Instagram, and then Shorts, and then you have the YouTube, and then you need to create thumbnails, and then you want to summarize the transcript and make it a newsletter. Like that used to be a full team work, but because of AI, there are now kind of tools for each individual step there where you could probably feed it this video that we're recording now, and it will automatically pull out 10 clips for short-form video. It'll pull the transcript. It'll help you draft the newsletter. It'll help you like maybe draft multiple newsletters and lead magnets and stuff to post on LinkedIn and X. And so I do think tools and software and AI really behind a lot of that is actually pushing the proliferation of what a one-person team can do and give more creators multiple shots on goal to get their content out into the world.
Absolutely. Well, that's exactly what I'm doing.
And I've combined that with some of the agentic tools as well. I share some of that with our audience. I've actually built a second brain on Obsidian and I've tied in Claude Code and it's got agents and it's doing everything for me, including sending out all those little emails to you that you might have gotten on booking this podcast and the next steps that are going to happen thereafter. So absolutely, we're in this era now that I would say even push this even further that if you're not using those tools, if you're not taking advantage, you're going to find yourself at a strategic disadvantage because what's going to happen is if you're doing things the old way, you're just going to become swamped by the other people who are doing things in the modern way. I don't really think there's much of an alternative now to sort of resisting, if you will, the Borg, you know.
I mean, it's exactly what I said earlier and like how we're thinking about deploying it at our company. If we're going to require at least one person from every team to do it after two months, that one person who's adopted AI and each week created their own automation or workflow, like they are going to be so much more productive than those who have not adopted it. And then there's just an interesting dynamic of like there's only one path forward. You either have to like follow and adopt like the latest automations and tech to be able to do your job better, or you fall behind on the team. And typically when a subset of people fall much further behind the other output on the team, like there's only really one answer there of how to proceed. And so I think the writing is kind of on the wall there.
Yeah. So let's get into a little more in the creator economy and I'm kind of curious as to where beehiiv sees its role sort of maybe evolving. You know, as mentioned, I've been keeping an eye on these platforms and what used to be, say, a newsletter platform, then adds a podcast, and then adds video, and the next thing you know, it's kind of more of sort of a creator platform, an audience growth platform. And so where do you kind of looking out sort of farther, you know, where does beehiiv fit into this broader picture of how independent operators and small teams especially are building media businesses? Because everything you're saying, I'm thinking, yeah, it's like, you know, I got to get my video act together, the podcast, I got the newsletters, I need to build that ecosystem, grow my audience because usually when you're monetizing, it all starts from do you have an audience? You know, if you don't have an audience, really not much to monetize.
Yeah, 100%. I think the thesis that I have and the one that we're executing against is I think there's going to be a lot of consolidation in the creator economy. I think that the days of having one platform to host your website, a separate platform to have your newsletter, to sync the paywalls and like data between both of them, to have like your monetization and your distribution and your podcast on all different platforms, to have to like do a data dump into S3 and then set up your own analytics. Like there's just so many constituent parts to building a successful creator business. And I think those that are best-in-class have their act together and can pull that off. But the long tail doesn't have the technical capabilities or the engineering bandwidth to really pull together these like eight different disparate systems to do anything that would truly be best-in-class. And like we acquired a website builder a year and a half ago and that was our thesis that we had a website builder before that was pretty rudimentary. And so being able to couple web and email was like a big thing for us. We've obviously always had paid subscriptions so you can charge your audience $10 a month. We handle the paywall. We handle all of the payments. We don't take a cut of revenue, which is very rare for the creator economy. Most of those platforms that we compete with do take a cut of your revenue. The ad network is like a huge innovation and like a monetization opportunity. And so I think you can work your way down like we launched a link-in-bio tool in November. We launched part of podcast in November and more podcasts coming in the next month or two. And so I think you can just see if our thesis is that the creator economy is going to consolidate and that's what we're seeing other players in the creator economy do, you can imagine a world where beehiiv is the place that you go for to create content, to distribute content, to monetize content, and to find new audiences to tap into. And I think that's kind of like the real vision of what we're building towards.
Yeah, it's interesting. Like the closest analogy that I could think of that's not directly in your industry would probably be like Shopify. How Shopify started as a shopping cart. I actually remember those guys when they were just 12 people, too. And now they're just like, hey, if you're doing anything with e-commerce, anything related to it, Shopify has become that big platform. So it sounds like you have that sort of platform perspective and vision, but focused on sort of the creator economy.
