beehiiv

beehiiv productized tools Tyler Denk had already built for Morning Brew. Denk built a CMS, an ad inventory system and a referral program to remove Morning Brew's manual chores, and Morning Brew made $25 million a year from what the team built. Hundreds of newsletter owners wrote in each week asking how Morning Brew did it, which gave beehiiv a ready-made roadmap.

Writers had spent 3 hours a night pasting stories into an HTML template and then into Mailchimp, and sales ran 50 to 60 advertisers a week in a Google Sheet. Morning Brew's leaders turned down selling the tech because they were already discussing M&A, so Denk took the idea out on his own.

Subversive▶ 8:50

Borrowed credibility sold an unfinished product to the first 1,000 publishers. beehiiv launched with about 5% of competitors' functionality, but everyone wanted a 'Morning Brew for crypto, real estate, AI', and the founders had built Morning Brew's growth engine. That background bought trust before the product was mature.

Timing also helped: Substack was three or four years ahead, and solo writers like Ben Thompson were showing a newsletter could be a $5 million-plus business. "We didn't have much else to hang our hat on. It worked in the early days and bought us trust."

Subversive▶ 14:40

Weekly major launches let a rough MVP overtake older platforms. With four founding engineers, beehiiv shipped at least one major feature every week. Each release showed existing users their feedback was heard, gave prospects features rivals lacked, and signaled that missing features would arrive soon.

Denk launched early out of fear someone else would get there first, and the first two hires were full-stack engineers. "If you wait till it's perfect, you're too late."

Subversive▶ 13:40

Each launch is run as a repeatable marketing moment. The team hypes each feature the night before, posts animated explainer videos on every social channel, and sends a product update newsletter to 450,000 current users. Employees are prompted in Slack to engage in real time.

Denk calls the routine a flywheel and says the playbook is now "pretty robust".

Subversive▶ 20:40

Asking publicly for the worst parts of the product produces the roadmap. One post on X and LinkedIn asking for the worst part of beehiiv drew 250 critical comments, which Denk treats as the next six months of roadmap.

He re-asks later and aims for different answers each time. "For me, it's like our roadmap for the next six months of what we can do better."

Subversive▶ 13:54

Unfiltered founder content turned trust into growth, funding and hires. Denk writes a weekly newsletter, Big Desk Energy, sharing wins, losses and layoffs, and started with under 5,000 followers. The Series A closed in under a week because investors already followed the numbers and his thinking.

Readers feel a parasocial relationship with him, so customers give the company a second chance after a mistake, and some hires began as subscribers. The cost is about five hours a week to write the newsletter.

Subversive▶ 18:35

Public monthly updates create pressure never to have a down month. The monthly investor update goes to investors, friends, family and investors who passed, and Denk says beehiiv has never had a down month. Investors needed little diligence as a result.

Inside the company he shares board decks, cash balance, revenue and costs with everyone. Competitors that have been in the industry 5 to 15 years longer have copied beehiiv's roadmap, and Denk bets beehiiv still out-executes them.

Subversive▶ 23:50

A Hotmail-style footer puts the brand in front of every migrated audience. Emails and websites carry a 'built with beehiiv' footer unless the user pays to remove it. When Liquidity's newsletter moved 100,000 subscribers over, all of them saw the new look, a referral program and the footer the next day.

The effect compounds because every large publisher that moves exposes its whole list to the brand.

Subversive▶ 20:00

Creator success stories are meant to turn audiences into new creators. Denk wants more case studies and playbooks showing people who started with no audience or revenue, because audiences of successful creators often become creators and pick the same platform.

Subversive▶ 47:10

beehiiv made the leader's most hated pricing its wedge. beehiiv charges flat fees of $49, $79 or $159 a month with a 0% take rate, against Substack users' complaints of paying $10,000 to $15,000 a year in fees. One in seven new beehiiv writers now comes from Substack, including Time and Newsweek.

"I don't think by simply building the infrastructure to pass money through the pipes of Stripe that is the value that we should be extracting at that layer." The case is one-sided: it does not weigh what flat fees cost small or early writers.

Subversive▶ 27:30

A percentage take rate pushes the biggest publishers to graduate. A cut looks harmless at small scale but becomes meaningful as publishers grow, so the largest ones leave. Time and Newsweek switched for more features at about 40% of the cost.

ESPs charge from $100,000 a year for capabilities beehiiv offers at $79 a month. Denk says Substack is building a social platform while beehiiv brings enterprise-level software to prosumers.

Subversive▶ 30:00

beehiiv built publisher supply first to make an ad network possible. Denk's original idea was an ad network for newsletters, like YouTube for video creators, which needed enough supply to attract advertisers. Ads and the recommendation marketplace are now about a third of revenue and the fastest-growing part.

The north star is how many users earn more than they pay beehiiv, which drives churn toward zero. Advertisers include Nike, Netflix, Roku and HubSpot. Revenue figures and the $50 million 2026 target come from Denk and are not independently checked.

Subversive▶ 34:10

One platform with unified data replaces creators' stitched-together tools. Creators were combining WordPress, Mailchimp, Stripe, ad tools and referral software, so beehiiv acquired Typedream for websites and added digital products, podcast hosting and Community. Keeping data in one place ties a site visit to an open to a purchase and gives the ad network more to sell.

"You give an inch and they want a mile." Selling digital products inside newsletters is cited elsewhere as a smart way to monetize beyond subscriptions.

Subversive▶ 38:30

Users voted for Community as the big winter launch. Before the winter release Denk asked users what they wanted, and community won by a long shot. Creators with a 50,000-person list can generate $10,000 on day one of a community priced at $150 a month or quarter.

He frames newsletters and podcasts as one-to-many top of funnel and community as the many-to-many layer that retains and monetizes the audience.

Subversive▶ 42:40

Position as a newsletter platform plus everything around it. Denk thinks 'creator platform for anyone with an audience' is too vague, so he prefers 'newsletter platform plus anything you need to build around it'. ChatGPT names beehiiv and Substack as the top two newsletter platforms.

"It is so hard to be known for anything."

Subversive▶ 40:30

beehiiv rebuilt the editor first because every user touches it. Usage data showed 20% of users use automations and 10% have a podcast, but 100% use the editor, so beehiiv rebuilt it as a WYSIWYG with AI, styling and customization. It added Copilot across the app for admin work like analysis and sponsorship outreach.

A creator on a panel said she spent two days creating and five on admin; Denk wants AI to flip that to five days creating and two on admin. Copilot has full context of the user's business and content.

Subversive▶ 44:50

Denk bets AI slop will make human content and connection more valuable. He argues audiences will pay a premium for content written by a human they resonate with and for communities and events, so beehiiv invests in human creativity rather than automating it.

"There's going to be such a massive premium on human generated content and human connections."

Subversive▶ 1:01:00

One platform with unified data replaces creators' stitched-together tools. Creators were combining WordPress, Mailchimp, Stripe, ad tools and referral software, so beehiiv acquired Typedream for websites and added digital products, podcast hosting and Community. Keeping data in one place ties a site visit to an open to a purchase and gives the ad network more to sell.

"You give an inch and they want a mile." Selling digital products inside newsletters is cited elsewhere as a smart way to monetize beyond subscriptions.

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