Tyler Denk
Co-founder and CEO of beehiiv; employee #2 at Morning Brew
Where to hear and read about Tyler Denk1 episode or test
Tyler Denk is co-founder and CEO of beehiiv and was employee #2 at Morning Brew, where he built the growth tools that became beehiiv. The lesson most worth taking is to productize your own internal stack, then win with weekly shipping, public building and a pricing model your market leader can't match.
If you wait till it's perfect, you're too late.
Tyler Denk on Beating Substack, Shipping Weekly, and the 0% Take Rate Bet
Tyler Denk: the story and the lessons
1Tyler Denk's path from a failed startup to Morning Brew
A failed college startup left Denk broke but resourceful. Venturetorm was a two-sided marketplace that reached 10,000 to 15,000 users with no budget. Denk taught himself to code and wrote content on Quora and Medium.
The team sponsored hackathons at Harvard, Michigan, Waterloo and Toronto, and slept on an auditorium floor to sign up student developers. He skipped internships and graduated with $5 and $120,000 of student debt, then moved into his parents' basement.
A $3,000 freelance job became a career at Morning Brew. Co-founder Austin Reef, a childhood friend, paid Denk $3,000 to build a referral program he had no idea how to build. The team had no engineers, so the summer gig became a full-time role.
The alternative was a technology consulting job at Deloitte. A friend told him he could be one of 50,000 people with that title, or the only person building Morning Brew. He took it as a bet on himself.
2How Denk turned Morning Brew's internal tools into beehiiv
Denk built each tool to end a wasteful manual chore. Writers spent 3 hours a night pasting stories into an HTML template and then into Mailchimp. Denk built a content management system, which took about three months and required the founders to trust him through it.
Sales ran 50 to 60 advertisers a week in a Google Sheet, and missing assets surfaced at 10 p.m. the night before. He and the first engineer he hired built an inventory system to replace it.
Outside demand and $25 million a year proved the tools had value. Hundreds of newsletter owners wrote in each week asking how Morning Brew did it. Morning Brew was making $25 million a year from what the team had built.
Denk pitched Alex Lieberman on selling the tech, arguing the distribution of 3 to 4 million readers was already in place. Morning Brew's leaders declined, since they were already discussing M&A and a move from media to SaaS was a big curveball.
Building for his own need gave beehiiv a ready-made roadmap. Because Denk had solved these problems himself, beehiiv started with deep customer understanding and a list of what to build.
3How beehiiv grew from $3M to $20M+ ARR
Denk sold an unfinished product on Morning Brew's credibility. Early on, everyone wanted a "Morning Brew for crypto, real estate, AI", so the founders' background sold the platform and won the first thousand publishers.
"We didn't have much else to hang our hat on. It worked in the early days and bought us trust."
beehiiv shipped a major feature every week from day one. It launched with about 5% of competitors' functionality and four founding engineers, and shipped at least one major feature weekly. The first two hires were full-stack engineers.
Each release told users their feedback was heard, showed prospects features rivals lacked, and let watchers bet the missing features were coming. Denk launched early out of fear someone else would get there first.
Denk turns every weekly launch into a 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 to engage in real time through Slack.
Denk calls the routine a flywheel and says the playbook is now "pretty robust".
Denk asks users publicly what is worst about the product. One post asking for the worst part of beehiiv drew 250 comments. He treats the replies as a six-month roadmap and re-asks later, aiming for different answers.
He isn't afraid of negative feedback, which is what let him ship something rough.
A footer badge makes every user an advertiser. Unless a user pays to remove it, beehiiv adds a "built with beehiiv" footer to emails and websites, a Hotmail-style loop.
When Liquidity's newsletter moved 100,000 subscribers over, all of them saw a new look and the beehiiv footer the next day. The loop compounds as every large publisher that moves puts the brand in front of its whole list.
4Why Denk builds beehiiv in public
Denk built a following by posting daily with under 5,000 followers. In 2021 and 2022 he had under 5,000 followers and earned reach by posting consistently. His newsletter Big Desk Energy shares wins, losses and layoffs unfiltered.
Early posts were just his excitement about what had launched. Readers feel a "parasocial relationship" with him, so they give the company a second chance after a mistake.
Public updates closed the Series A in under a week. Investors already followed Denk's monthly updates and revenue numbers, so they needed little diligence. Some hires began as accidental newsletter subscribers who came to share the vision.
The cost is time: the weekly newsletter takes about five hours to write.
Sharing revenue publicly keeps Denk from having a down month. The monthly investor update also reaches friends, family and investors who passed. Denk says it makes him determined never to have a down month, and beehiiv has never had one.
He shares board decks, cash balance, revenue and costs with the whole company, believing smart hires should have as much information as possible.
Denk accepts that rivals copy him and bets on execution. Competitors that have been in the industry 5 to 15 years longer have all copied beehiiv at some point.
He says that leaves beehiiv "in the driver's seat", even though they are larger. He names innovation, ability to operate, the leadership team and company direction as what others can't match.
5How Denk beat Substack with a 0% take rate
Denk charges for software and takes no cut of creator revenue. Plans cost $49, $79 or $159 a month by size. His view is that passing money through Stripe is not value beehiiv should extract.
"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." He feels fine charging for features that 40 engineers built from Morning Brew's lessons.
Denk picked the leader's most hated pricing as his wedge. He gives three reasons for 0%: counterpositioning, philosophy, and the top complaint on X, which is growing out of Substack's fees. He calls Substack's take rate "predatory".
Substack users complain of paying $10,000 to $15,000 a year in fees, against roughly $200 a month on beehiiv.
Large publishers outgrow Substack and move to beehiiv. One in seven new beehiiv writers now comes from Substack, including Time and Newsweek. Time and Newsweek got everything their prior platform did plus 15 other things at 40% of the cost.
Big email platforms start at $100,000 a year for what beehiiv sells in a $79 plan. Denk also sees Substack building a simple social platform while beehiiv brings enterprise software to prosumers.
6Denk's plan to build an ad network on beehiiv
The ad network was Denk's original idea, not the software. His original insight was the "largest ad network for newsletters". At Morning Brew, 25 of 40 staff worked on partnerships and sales, and ads built a $25 million revenue business.
He admired the zero marginal cost model of Google and Meta. Ads suit creators better than subscriptions, but solo creators can't sell them.
He built the supply side first to attract advertisers. Advertisers only come with enough supply, and supply only comes if the software is good enough to pull publishers off rival platforms. The north star is users earning more than they pay beehiiv.
A user paying $1,000 a year who earns $10,000 from ads has no reason to leave, so churn goes to zero. Ads and the recommendation marketplace are about a third of revenue and the fastest-growing part, with Nike, Netflix, Roku and HubSpot advertising.
By 2030 Denk wants advertisers buying niche audiences directly. A brand like Nike could set a budget and target by age, income and category across websites, newsletters and podcasts, shifting spend between formats.
The flywheel is that ad dollars let creators go full-time, their audiences grow, and some readers launch their own newsletters and communities. Denk calls the creator economy the future of media.
7How Denk expanded beehiiv into an all-in-one platform
Denk replaced a six-tool stack with one system and shared data. Creators pasted WordPress posts into Mailchimp, ran banner ads separately, and set up Stripe and referral tools. One platform recognizes a site visitor, a newsletter opener and a buyer as the same person, with no data lake.
Users kept asking for more, which led to acquiring Typedream for websites and launching digital products, podcast hosting and Community. "You give an inch and they want a mile."
User votes picked beehiiv's biggest launch, Community. Before the winter release, users answered "what should we launch?" with community by a long shot. Denk sees newsletters and podcasts as one-to-many and community as the many-to-many layer that retains and monetizes.
He says a 50,000-person list launching a community at $150 a month could earn $10,000 on day one.
Denk rebuilt the one feature every user touches. Only 20% of users use automations and 10% have a podcast, but every user uses the editor, so it was rebuilt as a WYSIWYG. Copilot now sits across the app with full context.
One creator told Denk she spends two days creating and five on admin. He wants it flipped, with AI handling analysis and sponsor outreach rather than creation.
Denk worries an everything platform is hard to describe. He prefers "newsletter platform plus anything you need to build around it" over the vague "creator platform for anyone with an audience".
"It is so hard to be known for anything." ChatGPT already names beehiiv and Substack as one and two for newsletter platforms.
Denk admits creator success stories are an untapped growth channel. More products mean more creators can quit their jobs on beehiiv, and their audiences often become creators on the same platform.
He says user education and playbooks are an area where beehiiv is slacking.
8How Denk works and why he bets on human content
Denk bets human content and connection gain value as AI spreads. He argues people will want to read content written by a human they resonate with, and sees Community and future events as a fit for that demand.
He contrasts this with founders chasing the lowest-hanging fruit in AI automation. "There's going to be such a massive premium on human generated content and human connections."
Denk works about 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. He works from Medellín, citing 75 to 80 degree weather year round, a founder community and low cost of living.
He wakes at 5:30, stretches and meditates for 15 minutes each, and avoids his phone for the first hour. He stopped opening Slack in bed after years of waking to outages.
beehiiv is fully remote and Denk wants more time in person. The company holds one weeklong offsite a year, and Denk would like at least a quarterly meetup because time with the team is "contagious".
He says he isn't arguing for a return to office and wouldn't trade remote work.
Most growth and revenue figures are Denk's own claims. The $3M to $20M+ ARR path and the $50 million 2026 target come from Denk and are not independently checked, and the latter is a forecast.
The case against Substack is one-sided, with no look at what beehiiv's flat fees cost small or early writers.
Tyler Denk on Beating Substack, Shipping Weekly, and the 0% Take Rate Bet
Tyler Denk explains how he productized Morning Brew's internal growth stack into beehiiv, winning early with weekly shipping, public building and a 0% take rate against Substack. The result is a platform that went from $3M to $20M+ ARR and is expanding from newsletters into websites, podcasts, communities and an ad network.
A failed college startup left Denk broke but resourceful. Venturetorm was a two-sided marketplace that reached 10,000 to 15,000 users with no budget. Denk taught himself to code and wrote content on Quora and Medium.
The team sponsored hackathons at Harvard, Michigan, Waterloo and Toronto, and slept on an auditorium floor to sign up student developers. He skipped internships and graduated with $5 and $120,000 of student debt, then moved into his parents' basement.
A $3,000 freelance job became a career at Morning Brew. Co-founder Austin Reef, a childhood friend, paid Denk $3,000 to build a referral program he had no idea how to build. The team had no engineers, so the summer gig became a full-time role.
The alternative was a technology consulting job at Deloitte. A friend told him he could be one of 50,000 people with that title, or the only person building Morning Brew. He took it as a bet on himself.
Denk built each tool to end a wasteful manual chore. Writers spent 3 hours a night pasting stories into an HTML template and then into Mailchimp. Denk built a content management system, which took about three months and required the founders to trust him through it.
Sales ran 50 to 60 advertisers a week in a Google Sheet, and missing assets surfaced at 10 p.m. the night before. He and the first engineer he hired built an inventory system to replace it.
Outside demand and $25 million a year proved the tools had value. Hundreds of newsletter owners wrote in each week asking how Morning Brew did it. Morning Brew was making $25 million a year from what the team had built.
Denk pitched Alex Lieberman on selling the tech, arguing the distribution of 3 to 4 million readers was already in place. Morning Brew's leaders declined, since they were already discussing M&A and a move from media to SaaS was a big curveball.
Building for his own need gave beehiiv a ready-made roadmap. Because Denk had solved these problems himself, beehiiv started with deep customer understanding and a list of what to build.
Denk sold an unfinished product on Morning Brew's credibility. Early on, everyone wanted a "Morning Brew for crypto, real estate, AI", so the founders' background sold the platform and won the first thousand publishers.
"We didn't have much else to hang our hat on. It worked in the early days and bought us trust."
beehiiv shipped a major feature every week from day one. It launched with about 5% of competitors' functionality and four founding engineers, and shipped at least one major feature weekly. The first two hires were full-stack engineers.
Each release told users their feedback was heard, showed prospects features rivals lacked, and let watchers bet the missing features were coming. Denk launched early out of fear someone else would get there first.
Denk turns every weekly launch into a 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 to engage in real time through Slack.
Denk calls the routine a flywheel and says the playbook is now "pretty robust".
Denk asks users publicly what is worst about the product. One post asking for the worst part of beehiiv drew 250 comments. He treats the replies as a six-month roadmap and re-asks later, aiming for different answers.
He isn't afraid of negative feedback, which is what let him ship something rough.
A footer badge makes every user an advertiser. Unless a user pays to remove it, beehiiv adds a "built with beehiiv" footer to emails and websites, a Hotmail-style loop.
When Liquidity's newsletter moved 100,000 subscribers over, all of them saw a new look and the beehiiv footer the next day. The loop compounds as every large publisher that moves puts the brand in front of its whole list.
Denk built a following by posting daily with under 5,000 followers. In 2021 and 2022 he had under 5,000 followers and earned reach by posting consistently. His newsletter Big Desk Energy shares wins, losses and layoffs unfiltered.
Early posts were just his excitement about what had launched. Readers feel a "parasocial relationship" with him, so they give the company a second chance after a mistake.
Public updates closed the Series A in under a week. Investors already followed Denk's monthly updates and revenue numbers, so they needed little diligence. Some hires began as accidental newsletter subscribers who came to share the vision.
The cost is time: the weekly newsletter takes about five hours to write.
Sharing revenue publicly keeps Denk from having a down month. The monthly investor update also reaches friends, family and investors who passed. Denk says it makes him determined never to have a down month, and beehiiv has never had one.
He shares board decks, cash balance, revenue and costs with the whole company, believing smart hires should have as much information as possible.
Denk accepts that rivals copy him and bets on execution. Competitors that have been in the industry 5 to 15 years longer have all copied beehiiv at some point.
He says that leaves beehiiv "in the driver's seat", even though they are larger. He names innovation, ability to operate, the leadership team and company direction as what others can't match.
Denk charges for software and takes no cut of creator revenue. Plans cost $49, $79 or $159 a month by size. His view is that passing money through Stripe is not value beehiiv should extract.
"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." He feels fine charging for features that 40 engineers built from Morning Brew's lessons.
Denk picked the leader's most hated pricing as his wedge. He gives three reasons for 0%: counterpositioning, philosophy, and the top complaint on X, which is growing out of Substack's fees. He calls Substack's take rate "predatory".
Substack users complain of paying $10,000 to $15,000 a year in fees, against roughly $200 a month on beehiiv.
Large publishers outgrow Substack and move to beehiiv. One in seven new beehiiv writers now comes from Substack, including Time and Newsweek. Time and Newsweek got everything their prior platform did plus 15 other things at 40% of the cost.
Big email platforms start at $100,000 a year for what beehiiv sells in a $79 plan. Denk also sees Substack building a simple social platform while beehiiv brings enterprise software to prosumers.
The ad network was Denk's original idea, not the software. His original insight was the "largest ad network for newsletters". At Morning Brew, 25 of 40 staff worked on partnerships and sales, and ads built a $25 million revenue business.
He admired the zero marginal cost model of Google and Meta. Ads suit creators better than subscriptions, but solo creators can't sell them.
He built the supply side first to attract advertisers. Advertisers only come with enough supply, and supply only comes if the software is good enough to pull publishers off rival platforms. The north star is users earning more than they pay beehiiv.
A user paying $1,000 a year who earns $10,000 from ads has no reason to leave, so churn goes to zero. Ads and the recommendation marketplace are about a third of revenue and the fastest-growing part, with Nike, Netflix, Roku and HubSpot advertising.
By 2030 Denk wants advertisers buying niche audiences directly. A brand like Nike could set a budget and target by age, income and category across websites, newsletters and podcasts, shifting spend between formats.
The flywheel is that ad dollars let creators go full-time, their audiences grow, and some readers launch their own newsletters and communities. Denk calls the creator economy the future of media.
Denk replaced a six-tool stack with one system and shared data. Creators pasted WordPress posts into Mailchimp, ran banner ads separately, and set up Stripe and referral tools. One platform recognizes a site visitor, a newsletter opener and a buyer as the same person, with no data lake.
Users kept asking for more, which led to acquiring Typedream for websites and launching digital products, podcast hosting and Community. "You give an inch and they want a mile."
User votes picked beehiiv's biggest launch, Community. Before the winter release, users answered "what should we launch?" with community by a long shot. Denk sees newsletters and podcasts as one-to-many and community as the many-to-many layer that retains and monetizes.
He says a 50,000-person list launching a community at $150 a month could earn $10,000 on day one.
Denk rebuilt the one feature every user touches. Only 20% of users use automations and 10% have a podcast, but every user uses the editor, so it was rebuilt as a WYSIWYG. Copilot now sits across the app with full context.
One creator told Denk she spends two days creating and five on admin. He wants it flipped, with AI handling analysis and sponsor outreach rather than creation.
Denk worries an everything platform is hard to describe. He prefers "newsletter platform plus anything you need to build around it" over the vague "creator platform for anyone with an audience".
"It is so hard to be known for anything." ChatGPT already names beehiiv and Substack as one and two for newsletter platforms.
Denk admits creator success stories are an untapped growth channel. More products mean more creators can quit their jobs on beehiiv, and their audiences often become creators on the same platform.
He says user education and playbooks are an area where beehiiv is slacking.
Denk bets human content and connection gain value as AI spreads. He argues people will want to read content written by a human they resonate with, and sees Community and future events as a fit for that demand.
He contrasts this with founders chasing the lowest-hanging fruit in AI automation. "There's going to be such a massive premium on human generated content and human connections."
Denk works about 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. He works from Medellín, citing 75 to 80 degree weather year round, a founder community and low cost of living.
He wakes at 5:30, stretches and meditates for 15 minutes each, and avoids his phone for the first hour. He stopped opening Slack in bed after years of waking to outages.
beehiiv is fully remote and Denk wants more time in person. The company holds one weeklong offsite a year, and Denk would like at least a quarterly meetup because time with the team is "contagious".
He says he isn't arguing for a return to office and wouldn't trade remote work.
Most growth and revenue figures are Denk's own claims. The $3M to $20M+ ARR path and the $50 million 2026 target come from Denk and are not independently checked, and the latter is a forecast.
The case against Substack is one-sided, with no look at what beehiiv's flat fees cost small or early writers.