I graduated with $120,000 of student debt. I had no internship experience, no mechanical engineering job would hire me, nor would a software engineering company hire me, and I had like no money. I used to have a screenshot like less than $3 in my bank account.
From the basement to the higher net, scrolling, tapping, that we ain't done yet. Let's blow up the internet.
So you can make money with newsletters? Are you sure about that?
Uh, we're testing. We're in the, we're in the idea stage currently, but we're, we're pretty optimistic about the future of newsletters.
But nobody opens their email, right?
Yeah, no one uses email, but we think with the right platform, with the right type of design and creators, there's a chance that we may be able to get people to open more of their emails.
It's crazy, crazy. Yeah, I don't think anybody opens their email. I typically scroll Twitter a few hours a day, TikTok after that, go back to Instagram. Most of my news is TikTok based. CCP, is that what it is? Not CP, CCP, yeah, and chat CCP, which is DeepSeek. Yes, yes. So definitely newsletters, nobody opens them. You can't make money, so don't, don't start one and don't write one on Sunday nights because no one opens, no, no one opens mine.
So isn't White Lotus on Sunday now?
Oh, true. Sunday morning, so hopefully people get to finish it before your, your...
Oh, you do that? Yeah, yeah, a little thing, you know, only like 170 weeks straight, you know.
Um, it definitely always blows people's minds when, when they realize you can make money with newsletters.
Like 100%, like, yeah, investors were confused, right?
Uh, we got told no for a lot of reasons. I'd say one is the narrative that email has been dying for two decades now. That was also like Slack's like go-to marketing phrase, right? Like email is dead, the full like New York Times or like Wall Street Journal like take over. I think actually email is like the furthest thing from dying. I think any professional in any setting has to go to their email more than they go to anything else. Whether it's you're applying for jobs, you have a job, you're booking vacations, you're checking receipts, like the one constant in most people's life, which is a crazy thing to say, is that you have to go back and check your email for work or life or something. Um, I think there is like a flood of new information and certainly people with cold emails that are extremely obnoxious, but yeah, you can make a lot of money with newsletters and a lot of people are crushing.
Dude, it's been insane. So started my newsletter three years ago, you converted me over from Substack to beehiiv. Something that I've always found like super helpful that I've learned from you is like when you're building a platform for creators to, you know, create stuff, like creators, everybody obviously, but like especially artists, like we want to make more money. And like writers, it's really hard for writers to make money. And so you could have either gone the Substack intellectual, you know, uh, intellectual elite route for like whatever.
We hate intellectual. That, dude, we, we hate them. We like meme lords.
And or, or you go the, the route of like we, we help you guys make more money. So like I've taken a similar approach where it's like you can make money with memes. Like this is not like an art platform. This is like, you know, a lot for meme marketing, right? And I don't know, I think, I think people underestimate how important that is, like how much people care about that.
Um, my thesis, just to jump in, is there's two things that our users care about. It is growing faster and making more money. And I think if we can build tools in a platform that helps you grow faster, and there's a lot of things that come with growth. Yes, it's a larger number, but there's also influence, right? People want to be seen, people want to be heard, people want opportunities. Being able to speak and send a message to more people is influence, it's power, it is an opportunity to make money in the future by having more people in your list. So growing faster and obviously making money, bottom line, how can we have them pay back what they're paying us if they are paying us? How can we have them earn revenue to reinvest into other channels, other business units, whatever it may be. Um, but I think that's something that I've known very early on, two things that people care about. Uh, there's a lot of like inputs prior to that that you have to do well, right? You have to create good content, you have to have a strategy, you have to like have a target audience that resonates with what you're building. But at the end of the day, numbers go up is really what keeps people around.
And numbers, growth, revenue, 100%. And like people underestimate how important that is. Like it's the reason why, you know, beehiiv is scaling it. Um, last year my newsletter, uh, you know, it, it took a few years because I was started, I started when I was, you know, 21, 22, scrappy, broke. And you know, as I've grown it, like, you know, way past six figures last year, and you know, uh, with the mix of like ads and community and all sorts of stuff. And it's, it's crazy. Like I remember how stupid people thought I was for writing a newsletter every week. And like for the writers out there, like you're going to look like an idiot when there's only 100 subscribers, right? Or like there's only a thousand subs, or you're not making money. And it's like, what's, what the [__] is the point? It's like, no, this is for you. It's, it's a long haul investment. And my newsletter has taken me crazy places. It's taken me here, um, taken me to conferences, got me, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of customers, right? And like helped me build my software, um, the newsletter as like the home base for everything. And I don't think people, everybody realizes that yet.
I also think newsletters went mainstream. Is like there's plenty of people that came before Morning Brew, but like a lot of people look to Morning Brew, The Hustle, SaaS, and they see massive newsletters with a huge audience and advertising base. And so for I think a lot of people getting started, they feel like there's a very high bar of I can't make money till I have 50,000 subscribers. We have newsletters that are in single-digit thousand subscribers bringing home 100K plus from events, sponsorships, community, products, like just using email as top of funnel. There's a lot of very niche applications and use cases for it where you don't need, like for example, this trip that I put on is like technically I guess like revenue from the newsletter, like that's how I source like most of the founders. And I could have had 500 founders on my email and generated tons of revenue from this.
So 100%. Which also, should we own where we are? Why, why we're not in this beautiful New York studio? We, we are in Costa Rica right now. Uh, we're at Tyler's retreat. Uh, big desk, big desk energy. Um, what do we, what do we think so far?
Dude, it has been an incredible time. Um, I, it's like six, six other founders, I think. Uh, we've done like presentations, introductions. If you're ever thinking about going on a retreat, go on Tyler's. But if you're ever thinking about hosting a retreat or events, something that I really like that we've done so far, speaking about events, is like the introductions have actually felt almost like a podcast episode where instead of doing stupid icebreakers for five minutes where you learn nothing, we each did introductions for 45 minutes, um, over like a span of like four days, basically three days. Just like the, the deepening of connections, it's almost like reading somebody's newsletter for like a year or something.
Everything ties back to email.
Everything, everything goes back to email and memes. That's it. Meme hive. Um, but yeah, I think it's, it's really, it's, it's insane like how many different ways you can make money with newsletters. Like you said, like, um, even when my newsletter was low, I was still making great money from it. Uh, and, and now it's growing more. Um, I think local newsletters are untapped.
Dude, it's, it's insane. I want, every time I go on Twitter, there's someone else who just launched a local...
No, it's crazy. Uh, it's wild. Um, because you get all these small businesses, you start throwing events, you become like a celebrity in your city. Like it's crazy.
We got to go back to the, the mastermind topic real quick.
Yeah, back to mastermind. How we even ended up here is one of my buddies who I met in MetaGene, uh, introduced me and was like, hey, we're going to host this mastermind event in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, four days, six other founders. We're going to surf, we'll do yoga, we'll do sound bath, and we're just going to talk business. I honestly just want an excuse to go to Costa Rica and surf. I saw the house, the Airbnb. I said, I don't know any of these guys. Sign me up. I trust you.
Yeah, kind of like a life-changing experience in the sense of I've been heads down building for the past three and a half years. Don't care for networking events. It's like not there, there's value in them, but it's an inconvenience. A lot of the networking events are standing around a bar awkwardly introducing yourself into some conversation, talking about what you do, seeing how transactional of a relationship it can be. Can they introduce you to someone? Can they help you? If not, move on to the next person. And if you're not playing that game, many of the other people in that room are playing that game. And so for four days we were in Costa Rica, we were chilling, we were like on the beach. It's not forced, it's not a conference, there's no itinerary. And then one day we sat down for lunch and we, like, most of us didn't know each other, and one person was like, so this is my background, this is what I do, this is where I'm struggling with my business, here's where I think the opportunity is. When you have the right group of people, the other six people listening to that were like, oh, you should try this software, or like, I have a buddy who's actually solved this exact problem, let me introduce you to them. And like, we talked from lunch to dinner to drinks. We sat down at this restaurant, this like beachfront restaurant, for I kid you not six hours and just did intros. And it was like the least transactional, like questions ranging from how much revenue are you doing to what are your long-term goals with this business, or like what are your long-term goals in life? Like, do you want to be a public founder CEO? Do you want to do this as a launching pad for something else in your career? And for six people I didn't really know at all going into this trip, left that six-hour sit-down knowing them more than like almost anyone outside of my best friends. Um, so that's like kind of what laid the foundation for doing this. And then I've wanted to come back to Costa Rica, I wanted to meet other founders. I launched the newsletter and like same thing going back to like the previous conversation of how do you make money with your newsletter. I could be like, I could just do ads, which I now do ads, but at the time I was like, I have 25,000 mostly founder, early startup people reading this newsletter. Let me just aggregate six or eight of the most interesting. We go to Costa Rica and everyone gets to meet other people. Yeah. Anyway, that's the backstory of this. It's been amazing. This is my third one. Glad here and we're having a great time.
I mean, you know, I, I don't know if you're comfortable, if I need to edit it, you need to edit it, but drop 10 Gs to be here, which is like a lot for a bootstrap founder.
Don't edit it. Price is going up. Price is going up. All right, drop 10 Gs is already worth it, uh, in my opinion. Like the presentations that we've done, everybody's done, like Tyler showed us the inside of beehiiv from like the weekly flows that he does with his team, the entire framework. And you know, I, I'm a solo founder and first-time kind of thing, like it's so helpful for me so far. And then I showed like my software and people already gave me more ideas.
Uh, got, dude, just inspired. Like, dude, you have, you have like six other founders who are so high agency watching you use your software, be like, this is where we get leads, this is where we like do that. And someone's like, yo, have you tried this automation? You're like, no, let me write that down.
Also just the inspiration. I don't know if I told you this last night, I was just feeling inspired. Uh, you know, I love to say you could just do things, like we're always saying that [__]. But like last night, I, I've been thinking a lot about this idea of secret agents. So AI agents, and I've always been like a James Bond fanatic, right? Like loved it since I was a kid, my dad showing it to me. And last night I was like, you know what, Dharmesh, founder of HubSpot, beehiiv user.
Yeah, yeah, dude, he, he [__] subscribed to my newsletter like three years ago and I never reached out to him. I just like, you know, never had much to say. And last night I was just inspired being around people like this, like just inspiring. So I cold emailed him. It's like, yo, I got an idea for an AI, like the branding sucks. Sorry, Dharmesh, the branding sucks right now. Like I didn't say that, but like, uh, I think it'd be really cool if you do this secret agent thing. I don't have time. I'm full-time on Mem Technologies. Like, but like, respect, respect. Yeah, but, but I think this would be sick. Three minutes later, signs up for my software. Three minutes.
Which it's also crazy because like he's a beehiiv user actually, and so we've emailed back and forth. It's something that a lot of people say, which I, I think I'm very good with my emails. I, I'm inbox zero every single night and try to be responsive as possible. I also go on the other end of the spectrum of like deep focused time, don't want to touch email or Slack for three hours and get [__] done.
He responds within an hour every time. It's so impressive.
It's insane. It's the same thing with like somebody like Mark Cuban or whatever. Like, I mean, you have to be super responsive to be successful, so it makes sense.
Um, take a step back. You have to be interesting to get a response. People, I put my email freely on Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever, because like when people are like, hey, I need help doing this, like I don't need to [__] around, file a support ticket, just email me directly. I'll triage and solve it. So then I have that relationship with our user. And people are like, why do you share your email? Like you can give my email. It's tyler@beehiiv. Like I will read your emails. Will I respond to your emails? Like maybe if it's interesting, right? And the interesting varies from like, it's not like I can make you more money. This is like a huge opportunity because like the higher lift or higher effort it is, the less likely I am to do it.
Dude, he's a billionaire, you know, like you just said, I'm building something cool and I have this idea for you. So like high agency, you're showing interest and you're like, I'm actually building this other thing and it's like catchy. And he's like, I can sign up and pay $6.99.
No, no, he, he signed up for the big $42 plan. He doesn't have a micro.
That's also, that's the life hack to growing a business, just sell to billionaires, obviously. Also, also, uh, sell to VCs and then don't raise VC. So I, I, uh, took like three or four VC meetings even after I knew I wasn't going to raise just to have them sign up.
I was like, that's good. Yeah, it's kind of like if you're ever applying for a job, like one, like common sense, like sign up for the product so you can speak to the product or whatever. But if you want to show like going above and beyond, like pay for the product and use all the features, it's a no-brainer. If you're going to go into like a VC meeting, they should probably like, unqualified if they're not going to sign up for the product.
Honestly, I said that. I said I'm not going to take the meetings. Like I, I literally said that because I, I, I wasn't that serious about raising. So I was like, why not? Um, that was a crazy experience, uh, thinking about raising and that entire thing. When did you consider raising?
This was like six months ago, uh, when I was first starting out. Um, and it was cool. I went to talk to the team at A16Z. Uh, Marc is the [__] man. He is a legend, like hilarious meme lord. This dude is 75-year-old billionaire kind of guy, and he's read my book and we became, you know, buddies. And, um, he gets it, he gets it. So I talked to the team and they were the first people that I was like, like I had already talked to him before. And, uh, they were super interested, right? And I pull it up and the coolest part, this was accidental, but I pull it up and there were already like 10 people making memes on there at the same time, which was like crazy during a VC call. That was like some big, big dick energy, right? And so they're super interested. And, you know, for me, like I decided not to raise. Uh, I enjoyed doing it by myself.
I, um, so is it a lack of control that you want to give up, which is why you don't raise, or is it you don't need the money, or you're already, you have enough revenue now?
Honestly, I don't need the money. And what I, you know, I kept talking to different friends, like I talked to Alex Lieberman, right, uh, early on, and he was basically like, dude, you don't have enough data yet. Like wait another six months. And I'm very glad. Also controversial, sometimes the best time to raise is when there isn't data because then you get into like data-driven investors. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but my thesis is, is like early stage, pre-seed, you're betting on like the founder or the team. Um, not that I'm like an expert investor, a few small seed checks that are like too young to even see if they'll work out. But from my experience, there were so many investors that said no to beehiiv because there wasn't enough data, there wasn't enough convincing data, or they were looking at other data of like size of TAM. Like dude, there's one, there was one investor that reached out being like, what do you think the total... he like kept nailing down the total market. And like, like first of all, like it's, it's the stupidest metric. Um, but there's like people who send emails, there's people who have a blog, there's people who have websites, there's like whatever, go different direction. So like obviously when building a slide, when I'm trying to build the business, I pull like a few random reports pre-ChatGPT time in 2021 and I throw up a random number that is just big enough to be exciting but not too big where it's unrealistic. And this one inexperienced, annoying [__] investor kept drilling on like, what do you think the TAM actually is? And I kept, I was like, I don't [__] know. And that you shouldn't be investing in a seed stage company if that's what you're worried about. Like Mailchimp sold for 13 billion, like there's a market there. I don't need to answer your... So anyway, like I hit profit like very quickly because it was cheap to build and I built it myself. And like, by the way, shout out Bubble.
Yeah, shout out Bubble. It's crazy. You, you gave the demo of what the platform looks like from the outside and inside, and I can't believe that's possible.
No, yeah, it was a lot of work, very, very tedious, but it works and it makes...
