Hello and welcome to another episode of Work 2.0, the podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Wells, and today I'm joined by Tyler Denk. He is the CEO and co-founder of beehiiv, and today we're here to talk about the future of creators, creativity in the context of AI. Of course, we're always going to be bringing you all the good stuff, all the news, all the up-to-date information of what's happening, and I thought no other best person to talk about this topic than Tyler. So Tyler, welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So let's do a bit of a warm-up. What, like, what inspired you to start beehiiv? When, when did you start?
Yeah, yeah. So we launched in 2021. The, the inspiration actually came from me and my two co-founders were early employees at Morning Brew, which went on to become one of the largest, most successful email newsletters, eventually acquired by Business Insider for 75 million back in 2020. So I was the second employee there. My two co-founders were also very early on the engineering side. So we kind of built the, the secret sauce, had like, you know, the editor, the website, the monetization, like how everything worked internally to help us scale, we had built in-house. And newsletters have been having a moment for like the past decade, and so we saw the opportunity of how the times were shifting towards owned audience, owned distribution. You could speak to the rise of Substack, you could speak to the rise of other independent journalists going and building successful standalone media businesses. And from the Morning Brew experience, seeing that, we kind of knew how to scale it successfully. We kind of thought that we had the secret sauce to be able to, quote-unquote, democratize that for anyone else who wanted to tap into it.
Wow, that's incredible. 2021, that's like you guys are still in your baby years of...
We're, we're infants still, yeah.
For sure. So okay, but then so when it comes to where you are with beehiiv right now, you're positioning it more as infrastructure, right? For creators, more than just like, okay, the next Mailchimp or something. So what do you think, why is it that creators need to think less like, you know, a content creator or influencer and more like a strategist? And what are the fundamental differences as they think about scaling their creative businesses?
Yeah, I think we're reaching a point in whether the creator economy or the content economy, because we work with a lot of large publishers as well. So it's not just creators, we have TechCrunch and Time and Newsweek. So large enterprise media companies as well leverage beehiiv to engage, create content, distribute that content, and engage and understand their audience. What I think we're seeing broadly is being a content creator in 2026 looks very different than what it did, you know, several years ago. I think it used to be you can do short-form video on TikTok and that's it. Or you're a YouTuber and that's it. Or you have a newsletter and that's it. But really what we're seeing is the most sophisticated and successful content creators today all are going multi-channel. And so they have a podcast where they also create clips for Instagram and TikTok, but they also have a newsletter. And then maybe they have a YouTube channel as well. And I think it's the most sophisticated and successful content creators know how to tie those different channels together. Ultimately with the service of how do we engage our audience where they are and provide value. And if you can provide value, you can also extract revenue. And how do they turn this into a successful business? And we've kind of built a lot of the tools and infrastructure to allow that.
I'm glad you mentioned that because like for myself, like a very obvious example, right? Obviously, you're on this podcast, which is hosted on Substack, and that goes to so many different audiences on Spotify, on different podcast platforms, and then I also have my newsletter, and then I also have a LinkedIn newsletter, and then I write for Forbes, and so I'm kind of like, and then I'm on other social media, LinkedIn, Instagram. So, much like you're saying, I'm not just limiting myself to one platform. I'm trying to meet my audience where they are with the same message, and I think that's really, really critical, especially, I'm not sure if you heard this stat, that by 2027, more than half of the US workforce will be freelancers. So, I think where you guys are positioned is pretty interesting because you're like positioning yourself to be the ecosystem for this new wave of freelancers. And I kind of want to add to that. When it comes to we think about content creation and blogging and vlogging and those sorts of things. Not everyone is a typical blogger, is it? Like no one goes into business saying I'm going to do blogging. They may just be a product manager and do that just to build their thought leadership. Like how does beehiiv fit into that?
It's actually funny you bring that up. I think one of our, we've done a lot of research into like our core customers, and one of our largest customer segments is actually co-founders and CEOs, which I assume fall under the thought leadership bucket. Or they do what I do because I have a personal newsletter that goes out every Tuesday to 130,000 founders, primarily startup employees, but it's really to help build the brand of beehiiv and like the company that I'm building. So, I think we're also entering this era where founder-led marketing and CEOs and leaders understand the value of creating content and content-based marketing as a way to engage with a potential customer that may not be your customer today, hoping that if they engage with your content, they extract value from your content, they one day could convert into a paying customer. You're just kind of playing a more sophisticated long game. An example of that, HubSpot bought The Hustle. The Hustle was like the West Coast Silicon Valley equivalent of Morning Brew. Basically daily business news about Silicon Valley and tech. HubSpot knows that their customer is a founder decision maker at a tech company, but no one wakes up and decides to buy a CRM for $50,000. So, it's very hard to get a customer in HubSpot, and they do like lead magnets, they do webinars. Like it's a very sophisticated pipeline. But they realize by acquiring The Hustle newsletter, they can actually reach their target customer, which are people who read The Hustle every single day Monday through Friday through the newsletter. And instead of them advertising other companies, they advertise HubSpot. So, on day 100 of reading the newsletter, when your boss comes to you and says, 'Hey, we need to buy a CRM,' the one that's top of mind for you is HubSpot because they've invested in a very long funnel. And so, I actually think that a lot of companies are waking up to like that is not the only way to acquire customers. And it varies per company and per industry, but I think more companies are doing this content-led marketing and I think it's really interesting. And to your point, I think we're very well positioned to serve them.
