How beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk Built a $3M/Month Newsletter Machine

BuzzFeed, Mashable, all these companies had massive layoffs or went out of business. Google used to drive all the traffic to publishers and now it's driving a lot less because of AI. I was the second employee at Morning Brew. I spend two days of the week creating content and five days doing all of the admin work around my content. Now using Claude and the MCP, every night it scans every new subscriber who signed up. It knows who my ideal advertisers are, and where you can see as the content creator every bot that is indexing and scraping your content.

And I think that's the world that we are moving towards, Steph, and I think that that's a big step towards this new chapter of ownership and AI.

Rightfully so.

Here for.

One, two, whichever way you want to do it. Yeah, sure.

Big caveat, you said we were one of the fastest growing newsletter platforms. I feel like that puts us in a pretty small pool. We're one of the fastest creator economy platforms. Let's put on our big boy pants here. We launched podcasts, we sell digital products, we have a website builder. We're paying out content creators and publishers over a million dollars a month through the ad network. So, very much a creator platform, not just a newsletter platform. Just for the record.

Yeah, so my background was I was the second employee at Morning Brew back in 2017. So, I built the internal infrastructure, I led growth, and I helped them scale from 100,000 subscribers to 4 million up until we got acquired by Business Insider in 2020. And so, through that experience, whether it was building the content creation tools for the writers or the ad management platform team for the sponsorship team, like the inner workings of how all of that worked, I became kind of like an expert in that. Around the same time, Substack launched around 2017. There's this newsletter wave, both VC-backed. You have independent journalists like Ben Thompson launching Stratechery. And so, there's this massive wave towards newsletters being cool and trendy. And then you have exits like Axios and Politico and Morning Brew, who are all newsletter-first media companies at a time where everyone's saying that media is dying and there's no business model there. And so, in taking, I guess, my expertise through my experience at Morning Brew, just saw like a huge opportunity. So, what really differentiated us when we launched wasn't that we were just building another software platform. It was we were building what we knew worked at Morning Brew. What got us from 100K to 4 million readers. And that's something I don't think any of the competition really has. And so, that's kind of how we've moved so quickly and know what to build.

Totally. I mean, I actually would say that I wasn't always a creator founder. I even push back. I don't really like to consider myself much of a creator now. I do have a newsletter called Big Desk Energy that goes out every Tuesday to 130,000 founders. And my value there is that I think a lot of successful startup founders don't share the secrets of how they are scaling. They think if they know something, if their competition finds out, they lose their competitive advantage. And they always have these rose-colored glasses of like, 'Oh, entrepreneurship and startups are so like it just is what it is.' It's really hard. And so, I took a very transparent route to being able to share exactly what it's like to build a company from hiring to firing to strategies to fundraising to our week in Cannes. Like it's really just like my life as a founder fully transparent. From that, we've gotten such great goodwill from other founders who have followed the journey. And then a lot of our users also read my newsletter. And so, hearing directly from the founder in terms of what they're prioritizing, what their values are, what their roadmap looks like, I think buys a lot of trust for our users to say, 'I align with Tyler. I align with the way that he sees the creator economy.' There's a lot of creator economy companies that have a predatory take rate model. There's a lot of creator economies that sell people's data. Like we have never done that and we've been very transparent. And so I think in this world that we're evolving into with AI and everything else, the more that you can get that the classic buzzword, which is authenticity, but actually transparency and know who's the person behind the company. There's a lot of faceless brands out there that you have no affinity towards. And then there's a lot of people, which is the thesis of the creator economy, that you really align with their values and what they believe in. And so it's been a huge competitive advantage for us.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's very symbiotic. I don't think there's like a one-size-fits-all for anything in the creator economy anymore. I think before there were video-only content creators who were only YouTuber or only TikTok. There were like newsletter-only content creators and then there was also podcasters. And now you see the most successful content creators do a little bit of everything. They're very active on YouTube. They have a podcast. They have a newsletter. Colin and Samir is an incredible example of that. Started with the YouTube, they had a podcast, they have a newsletter, now they're doing IRL events. And so what a successful creator looks like today in 2026 is some combination of short form, long form, and multiple different mediums. And I'd extend that even to the business models built around them. So it used to be, 'Hey, I only do subscription,' or 'I'm ad-based' or 'affiliate.' And now the best content creators, like we were with Oliver Darcy earlier, he's making more than a million dollars a year with subscriptions, probably making more than that in ads, and then he does IRL events as well. And so, you can kind of see a lot of that reflected in our roadmap as well. We started with newsletter, like I said at the beginning, we expanded into websites and then digital products and then podcasting. And so, you can see the evolution of our roadmap. It's growing with the creator economy and what it takes to serve these users.

So, last November we hosted something called the Winter Release Event, very original, and we launched 10 new products.

That was our initial transition from newsletter company to creator, what we call the operating system for the creator economy. And that's really what we are trying to build. The event was a huge success. We had tens of thousands of people tune in live. We got tons of press coverage and like it's really hard to capture a moment in this world where attention is so hard to gather. And as a small Series B company, we were able to garner a ton of attention for this one big event and like really make a splash in the creator economy. It actually led us, we did like a small strategic round of like $10 million over the winter that was like totally from inbound demand because people saw the vision of what we were building. So, like very opportunistic of us.

Yeah.

I think it like no, I'm definitely not in the peak newsletter saturation camp. I think there will, like we're not at peak books, we're not at peak podcast, we're not at peak video. Like everyone loves to say that we're at peak email because I think there is this association with like podcasts are podcasts, it's a form of entertainment. Email, you're mixing newsletters and media that you want to consume with a laundry list of items that your co-workers are emailing you about and that together is email. And so I think it gets a worse reputation, but I think like long form is long form. It's a great medium. It's an open protocol that's been around for three decades. It's totally decentralized where a lot of these tech platforms, you're totally subject to the algorithm. And the classic story that I always use is when Facebook, like there was a time when people were getting likes on Facebook. Like I was like, like my page on Facebook.

And the...

And the thinking was...

It used to matter a lot. The thinking was if I had 100,000 likes on my Facebook page, I post content to Facebook and Facebook will reward me by showing 100,000 people my content. And they had all of these brands investing so much money into getting more likes on their Facebook page. And then in 2018, Zuckerberg and a few PMs were like actually we want to prioritize people connections and not brands and not publishers. And so BuzzFeed, Mashable, all of these companies had massive layoffs or went out of business. And the lesson from that is if you become overly dependent on a single channel for distribution, they can give and they can take away and those companies were totally flat-footed. Twitter deprioritized external links in 2022. Obviously, it's very well-known now with like the Google AI overview in 2024, traffic to publishers have cut 40 to 50%. And so again, Google used to drive all the traffic to publishers and now it's driving a lot less because of AI. And so like the common theme from all of that is you just can't be overly dependent on a single platform. Email really is the great counteract of like it's an open protocol. You can use Apple Mail. You can use a million different email clients because it's an open protocol, but you can also send on beehiiv. You can send on Mailchimp. You can send wherever and it's very portable. And I think more creators are waking up to what it means to actually have ownership. A lot of creators are used to having 10,000 followers and seeing the same type of content going from a lot of people are seeing it to not that many people are seeing it and you're totally helpless. So email is really like a great counterbalance to that.

That's the thing that we can do creator too, but we are seeing a lot of businesses that are trying to get more creative with marketing and content marketing where like we have a newsletter called Creator Spotlight that just covers the creator economy.

And so like the whole thinking is the people who want to read that newsletter, one, they're interested in the creator economy, they should also be our users. But rather than just serving them Google Ads and Meta Ads, we provide value by giving them content that they resonate with and then that gets them into our funnel. They understand, they see all these other creators building massive businesses on email and just so happens it's sponsored by beehiiv and like it's very easy to get them into our funnel. And a lot like Ramp has a newsletter on us. Brex has a newsletter on us. Calci has a newsletter on us. So all of these very sophisticated B2B and B2C brands are investing in content marketing. Your actual question is like for creators who are scared to jump in, one, obviously sign up to beehiiv, it's free. That is where I do think we're seeing a lot of this explosion of newsletters in general. When I was at Morning Brew it took me and four engineers five years to build what we had built, to connect all these different pieces. And we were able now at beehiiv to build all of that to get started for free. And it's all the capabilities we had. So one is just like getting started. I think perfection over progress is like where a lot of founders get caught up, right? Like you never want to get in the way. Like you just need to take your first step and start creating content. It's my job as the head of product at the company to make sure it's seamless and not confusing and intuitive for any sort of novice or early user to be able to get started. And then like what you write about, it's like another form of expression. Like what do you post about on Instagram? What do you spend time reading about or consuming? But you want to make sure that you enjoy it. And my other piece of advice is a lot of people, there are always like these copycats of 'I want to be Morning Brew for AI' or 'Morning Brew for crypto.' And Morning Brew is a 7-day-a-week newsletter.