Beehiiv's CEO Grew a 100K Newsletter. Here's what he wants you to know.

Once you're in a certain frame of mind for creating content, you start to look for things differently. You kind of have to have that like content creator muscle, and the more you do it, the better you get. The secret about my newsletter is that it takes me 10 to 15 hours to write it every week. I rip it apart many times over and edit it a ton, because a lot of times it does come off cheesy initially and I'm like, 'Okay, that's not funny. I need to make this hit harder.' Or it's too in one direction without being applicable to like more people. So that's another thing that I'm pretty cognizant of. If it's so hyper-focused on my experience at beehiiv, but someone who's a founder at another company can't read it and extract any insights that they can apply to their company, that's like a secondary check that I do of like, is this not just interesting but applicable? But again, this is kind of like custom for like the content that I'm creating, and there's not a one-size-fits-all. But there's plenty of people who have no interest in the content that they create. They just know it's a lucrative industry to cover and that there's a business behind creating content for XYZ. That's not the content that I create, but there's not one way to do it.

It's a lot, a lot of time. It's because I'm a very slow writer and I'm also kind of a perfectionist. So like I'll rip through it four or five times before I feel good about it, which is a huge stressor in my life because running the company in addition to spending 10 hours writing a newsletter is like a lot to do.

Yeah. My weekends don't exist is what suffers. No, I guess it's also important to understand why you're creating content, and it's not always for the same reason, right? Like some people are in the content business for business. Like they want to generate revenue, they want paid subscriptions, they want ad revenue, they want to reinvest and grow an audience. Call it like the Morning Brew hustle playbook, like that exists. There's other people who create content where money isn't the motivating factor, or maybe it's not business. It is just because they want an outlet, and by having an audience of people who follow them, that opens doors beyond just capital. Is that invitations to different panels or events, or being a thought leader, or advancing your career? So I think it's first important to understand like why you're creating content. I know that beehiiv leans heavily because we've had so many acquisitions on the platform of like the business focus, like if I scale this quick enough, there's a large SaaS company who wants this exact audience that I can flip this for a million dollars, and like that's a great outcome, and like that's great, and like we definitely encourage people can, you know, generate revenue and like an asset that is valuable to other companies. But we have tons of like thought leaders, independent journalists, people who write as a hobby. And so I think it's also important to just understand why you're writing because there's not a one-size-fits-all.

The other thing I'd say is like I think experimentation is key, and that's something I was always impressed with at my time at Morning Brew. I sat right in between the sales team, which is who generated all the revenue, which I saw how they felt about brand partnerships, and on the other side of me I sat next to the content team. And you know, like for most people, Morning Brew was like you read it, you get in the morning, you read it for five minutes, it's cool, it's insightful, you laugh a little bit, you move on with your day. Sitting next to the people who spend eight to ten hours a day crafting this email and experimenting with like different subjects, different formats, different ways to communicate information, I was like very inspired by that. And so for my newsletter, I try to experiment wherever I can. Always be experimenting, I think is really important, and not to like pigeonhole yourself to a specific format or specific type of content because I think your audience is more forgiving than most people give them credit for.