913 - Tyler Denk (Beehiiv) On Building The Best Newsletter Platform

Mat Sherman: All right. How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Forward Thinking Founders, where we talk to founders about their companies, their visions for the future, and how the two collide. Today, I'm very excited to be talking to Tyler Denk, who's the co founder of Beehiiv. Welcome to the show. How's it going? 

Tyler Denk: What's up, Matt? Thanks for having me. 

Mat Sherman: Yeah, excited to have you on. I'm looking forward to learning more about what you are building with Beehiiv. , I think to start, although some of the listeners I'm sure have heard of you, I'm sure some have not. So let's start, at the high level. What are you working on? What is Beehiiv? 

Tyler Denk: Yeah, so my background, I was an early employee at Morning Brew along with my two co founders. Morning Brew, for those who are unaware, daily email newsletter, kind of in the business and tech space, got acquired by Business Insider. But I think probably many of your listeners are aware newsletters are growing in popularity, another medium to connect with your audience, to communicate, to write about topics, to engage and monetize.

And so the newsletter ecosystem was historically a bit fragmented, a lot of different tools, some for sending email, some for blogging, some for premium subscription, some for monetizing. And so what Beehiiv is in a nutshell is a platform That kind of combines a lot of those different aspects. So you would go, you would write your content, you'd publish to the web, you'd email your audience.

We have growth tools baked into it. We have monetization tools baked into it. So really you're one stop shop for creating a successful newsletter. 

Mat Sherman: So I've been writing. Online since 2010, I started with like Tumblr when I was writing about, you know, girls and whatever. And then I moved on to WordPress, the medium, and I was on Substack for a bit.

So I've seen a lot of, of these, of these platforms. And then I've not seen one that is so feature rich as yours. You, you are, you've built in so much functionality for customizing your newsletter and for growing your newsletter. It's insane. So I think my next question for you is of all the features that you've built for Beehive, like what are just.

Some of the things that you built for newsletter creators that may not be accessible in other platforms . 

Tyler Denk: Yeah. There's a few things. I think part of the reason why we are so feature rich is like Morning Brew is an incredible case study and success story, but we had four engineers dedicated to building whatever the writers wanted, whatever the sales team wanted.

And so we were very feature rich, but internal features at Morning Brew. And that's kind of why we came out firing while building Beehiiv. Like we already had the roadmap of this is what worked for us. And this is what scaled Morning Brew from 500 or 50, 000 subscribers to 4 million subscribers. So if we could bring that playbook to any newsletter, like that would be extremely valuable to them.

And so to answer your question, a few features I like, like the Morning Brew template looks beautiful. That required a lot of back and forth with an email developer, a designer. Um, it was all custom code. So being able in Beehiiv, you can create very beautiful templates. I've run a series of like beautiful newsletters on Beehiiv just because there's so many creative people out there and the tools are all no code.

So I say that because one really nice looking newsletter templates, typically custom coded. And then historical like incumbent email platforms typically are like marketing and e com based are like the drag and drop, very bulky editor, pretty limiting in design. And so we have like a medium style, lightweight editor, like very minimalist where it has full customization of background colors, borders, different types of styles.

So really proud of that. And then we've also built in a lot of the logic of only show this on web, only show this on email, only show this section to people that have more than five referrals, only show this to paying readers. So there's a lot of functionality built in that took us at Morning Brew, a lot of custom code and tweaking that you can do with no coding knowledge whatsoever.

So it's really just. I hate to use the word like democratizing that type of functionality, but like making it very easy for anyone with a newsletter to do that. So that's one feature. And then one of the huge success stories at Morning Brew was our referral program. When I was there, it led to over a million subscribers, which is like bigger than 99% of newsletters.

And that was just from referrals. So any user on Beehiiv can tap into that same referral program network and infrastructure. To incentivize their readers to share with other people to grow their audience organically. 

Mat Sherman: Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. What you built. It's quite awesome. And obviously it's informed, like you mentioned by your previous experience at Morning Brew.

I am curious, like when you were working on morning and when you're working at Morning Brew on Morning Brew, when did you decide that you wanted to, to, to, to leave and like start beehive and like, how did that. How did that all pan out? And like, how do you think about timing? Why not a year later? Why not a year earlier? Like, how did you decide when you decided? 

Tyler Denk: Yeah, I'd say the thing about like engineers and people who are like very ambitious and wanting to build things you is if you build something cool, you want thousands and millions of people to touch it and play with it. And while Morning Brew grows an incredible experience, and I think almost invaluable in the sense that we were building internal tools for our employees.

So I sat next to the content team. And the managing editor and understood exactly what customization they wanted in the newsletter, what, how they wanted images to look and how everything should be styled to optimize the reading experience for our audience. And then I sat next to the sales team and understanding what data they wanted to be able to be in market and be able to market our audience as to why advertisers should pay Morning Brew to advertise in our newsletters.

And so. Ultimately we were building tools for them. So we were building our tech and infrastructure for the growth team, for the content team and for the sales team. And so I say that because it's invaluable and being right next to the people you're building with 50, 60 hours a week and understanding every pain point and what data, what was useful, what was not useful.

Um, but then at the end of the day, like we were building tech for 30, 40 people. And I thought what we were building was really cool. And then I saw the newsletter wave. I saw other companies raising a ton of money at very large valuations and the tech that they were providing being semi underwhelming.

And I was like, I was pretty confident in what we built at Morning Brew is was more powerful. More data driven and more effective because the results were in the growth and success of the company itself. And that was kind of like the impetus for why not take a lot of what we built philosophically here and like in the weeds and make that accessible to anyone with a newsletter.

So that was kind of like the nudge of like me talking to my now co founders, then employees, um, just kind of thinking through like, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this for more people? and then the timing, I was there for three and a half years and eventually kind of like, When I was there, it was pure green space or white space or whatever the saying is, where I could build anything that could provide value.

By the end of three and a half years, a lot of the systems were already built out. We had the tech, the infrastructure, and I just kind of had an itch to do something else. Um, so like left after three and a half years and like great terms, everything was an incredible experience there. , just kind of wanted like a new challenge.

Mat Sherman: And kind of moving on to where you are now, like, I don't know if it's you or the actual Twitter account of Beehiiv but someone like posts you like your growth and how quickly things are blowing up for Beehiiv. And like, it sounds like, and it looks like things are. Going really quickly. So my question for you is like, how do you stay on top of everything as like the CEO, as like a co founder, someone running this company with such a, a steep growth curve, like what is your day to day look like?

And how do you like know when to change your day to day based on, uh, different levels of growth of the company?

Tyler Denk: Yeah, well, a few things it's. On the surface, what you see is up into the right and things are growing and things have been great to date for all things considered being 18 months into this, we just raised our series a, um, we surpassed 3 million ARR.

We're doing like an additional million in ads and a few other different revenue streams. So on the surface, business is great. What you don't see is like how hard everyone is working. Like we have a players top to bottom who are like hustling and really bought into what we're doing. Even though we're remote

we've built like a really incredible culture where there's complete ownership mentality, top to bottom, of people being very bought into the vision of what we're building and feel like they're a part of something very special, um, which is hard to replicate. And. we also like focus a lot is like the big thing.

I think that's something that I've gotten better at as I've gotten older, where I think five, 10 years ago, I felt productive if I was taking meetings, talking to people, seeing what opportunities existed. I think on the surface, you get pitched both people and partnerships and opportunities that sound cool.

And I'm sure there's some additive value if we went down path X to pursue that, but saying no to 95% of things and just being super focused on here's what's most important and most things are distraction. And it could be two things at once. Like it could be value additive. If we did X partnership, I'm sure some people would find value in it and it would make X better than what we're doing now, but is that the absolute best use of time and I think you always have to ask like what that trade off is.

Cause it's true to say no to things that could be good. Um, there's just things that are better and I think really nailing that and we have been very present on social and like our audience and users are people with an audience and content creators. So they have ideas, they're vocal about their thoughts and what they like, what they don't like.

It's very easy to over index on certain opinions and thoughts in the marketplace on Twitter, on LinkedIn, but being able to know where, where to lean in and listen and where to kind of take the sense of like, I think we know better than they do, and we can prove that to them over time. It's not easy and it takes reminding a lot of people on the team that like you can over index on every touch point and feedback.

Um, but focus is probably the big thing. 

Mat Sherman: Are you saying that you don't log into Twitter every day and that the tweet of the day that gets the most breezy was, you know, just listen to that advice. You're saying, you know, follow Twitter a hundred percent of the time. 

Tyler Denk: What's crazy though, is like when you are in the weeds and like that is where we get a lot of growth is from these different social platforms and one of the ways that we have been able to grow so quickly is user XYZ complains about something. And if we agree that they are right and we should fix it, we fix it quickly. And then they feel heard and then they become like more of like a lifelong fan of ours. So it gets for sure a growth strategy. But you have to be careful not to do that always, because there's always a course of people who think something different.

And like, we've only been able to get to where we are because we've had a very defined roadmap and we know what we're doing. And so it's kind of finding that balance of 90% stick to the plans, remain hyper focused. 10% always be receptive to feedback and be willing and have the bandwidth to take on things that maybe you didn't initially plan on building.

Um, but it's a tough balance for sure. 

Mat Sherman: Well, kind of on that note, looking forward into the future, um, you know, if you were to look at five, 10, 15 years, um, into the future, what do you see Behiivv looking like then? Or in other words, like what's your big vision here and what direction are you rowing in as you, as you focus on today, what does that lead to tomorrow?

Tyler Denk: Yeah, I'd say the big vision is if you are a company or a brand who has money, let's say you're a D2C product, you have a 100, 000 budget in August. You're going to consider going to Meta and advertising on Facebook and Instagram. You're going to go to Alphabet and do Google and YouTube ads. And ideally you go to Beehiiv and allocate a significant portion of your budget to hit the long tail of 10,000, 15,000 of the top newsletters in the world, based on who your target audience is, who the category is, who has been proven to convert to your product or service previously.

And knowing that if you want to advertise an email, which is a pretty distraction free environment that converts well, if you can find the right audience in the right medium, um, and just see continual results there. So I like phrasing it from that angle because brands are always looking for ways to get their product and services in front of others.

And if we can nail that, the, the amount of newsletters on our platform who can just focus on creating amazing content and sports and politics and tech, um, and know that they have monetization and ways to sustain their hobbies or interests or business and writing about this content. Because we've accumulated such a mass of quality newsletters.

And that then attracts advertisers who are willing to pay to get in front of them. One of the largest teams at Morning Brew was the sales team and it's a whole operation to know to go out into market to know who your audience is to sell it. Do the copywriting to service all of the ads, do the reporting and invoicing.

If we could lift everything I just said out and like allow content creators to focus on content, it's the same reason like YouTube, right? Like people are getting paid a ton on YouTube and they don't have to worry about the ad sales part. Google on YouTube handle that. And so five years from now having an ecosystem where we are at on the top of mind of any marketer.

Or business who wants to advertise their product and services, right along with meta and, uh, alphabet.

Mat Sherman: That's fantastic. I love that vision. And in order to make that happen, like you'll obviously need some help, right? It takes a village to make a startup work in scale. So my question for you is how can the forward thinking founders community help? Are you hiring? Are you looking for brands to, to go through this process you just mentioned? Are you raising money looking for, you know, people to work with? Like, how can we assist at forward thinking founders? 

Tyler Denk: Yeah, for sure. So we're always hiring. We're always looking for talent. We brought on two people this week that we actually didn't even have job descriptions for. So if you're talented and like you make the case that you think you are additive and that's like the benefit of raising a bit of money, like we can take bets on people more so than positions. And so. We've done that twice this week and are always open to, we also have a careers page with open positions, You hit on brands like if you're looking to advertise, we are at, I think about 300 million impressions as of this recording per month. So for brands looking to get in front of different audiences and email, we have plenty of impressions to serve, but like working backwards from that five year vision, you get there one by amassing the top 20,000/30,000 newsletters in the world, and you get there by building the best platform and tools first.

So it really is like that has always been the grand vision, but it's like an order of operations to get there. First, you have to build the tech and the user experience that attracts those newsletters. You build the growth tools to help them scale and grow their audience. You build the monetization tools so they are sustainable, so they make money.

And then big picture, once you've done all of that, you look up and you have an incredible ecosystem of content creators and newsletters, and then the brands will come. Um, so that's kind of like our playbook. And if you can fit in any of those categories, we'd love to talk. 

Mat Sherman: And then for my last question, if someone does fit in one of those categories and they want to reach out or it's a brand that is intrigued and learning more, how can they get in touch with either you or the right person at Beehive?

Is there a website, a social media, email address? Like how can someone kind of dive in? 

Tyler Denk: Yeah, it can be me for now. I'm, I'm happy to open the floodgates I have previously, and that's why I'm up at all hours working. But, uh. Yeah. Email Tyler at tyler@beehiiv.com com or dank underscore tweets on Twitter. Very active on both.

Mat Sherman: Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. I really appreciate it. 

Tyler Denk: Yeah. Thanks for having me.