This Is HOW Newsletters Can Make MILLIONS

Morning Brew went from 100,000 readers to eventually getting acquired for 75 million. And the first writers had no background in journalism; they were just taking stories that were interesting to them, and then changed the content from "here's what happened in the news" to "let me talk about it as if I was telling this to my best friend."

The model of "depending on platforms" that drive traffic has totally deteriorated. There was a time where Facebook and Twitter were incredible for distribution, and what happened was, in 2018, Facebook changed their algorithm and deprioritized content from brands and publishers, and tanked traffic overnight.

Twitter deprioritized links in 2022, and then Google with AI summaries are basically cutting traffic 40-50%. The most sophisticated content creators and the companies that have had a ton of success, what they all have in common is they actually are email-first.

And so email is a winning distribution channel. They can monetize with ads in the newsletter. They can do paid subscriptions. They can monetize with affiliates. They can push products in the email. And so they own their distribution.

Even if you have amazing brand equity and you have all these AI summaries, are people going to read newsletters in the next few years?

So I think.

Tyler, we've been in touch on email for a few years now, so it's great to finally speak, and this is the first time we're seeing each other face to face.

I know. It's great to meet you.

Awesome to be here. So you guys have been on quite a ride in the last few years, but we'd love to go back to the super early stages and hear more about the founding story, where did it all begin, and the founding story of Morning Brew as well.

Yeah. So I can't take credit for founding Morning Brew, but I was the second employee, so I kind of feel like I was a part of the founder journey, just joined a few years later than the two founders, Alex and Austin.

But yeah, I mean, the founding story of Beehiiv really does start with Morning Brew. I was the second employee at Morning Brew. For those who don't know, Morning Brew is a daily email newsletter that covers business news. When I joined, it was a single newsletter, went out Monday through Friday, and I joined when we had about 100,000 readers.

When I was there, I led product engineering and growth, incredible experience, got to build the website, got to build the newsletter. And in that journey of building Morning Brew from 100,000 subscribers to eventually getting acquired by Business Insider for 75 million, we kind of became this gold standard of the email newsletter industry.

And you've started to see a lot of these other media companies propping up that were email-first. So The Skim, The Hustle, Axios, Politico. And because Morning Brew is such a great case study and success story, and I had built so much of this internal tech, it was really when other companies, other media players, other creators wanted to emulate what Morning Brew created.

And I kind of knew the secret sauce behind the scenes of what it took to build Morning Brew. And so that really was the impetus for Beehiiv, is trying to bring that experience and that type of functionality and platform to anyone who wants to tap into it for their newsletter.

This is awesome. When I describe what we're building and other newsletters and kind of the big vision we have, they always say, "Oh, so like Morning Brew." And I remember Morning Brew, I would get emails, I think at 8, 9 a.m., I think I was in Europe at the time, and it was so well done, it was so well polished.

But I imagine even writing these things, sending it to millions of people, are you scrambling at like 4, 5 a.m. in the morning, you're taking your backpacks everywhere. Because I guess you're being taken to quite nice dinner parties and things like that as well.

Yeah. Well, so everyone expected because we sent the email at 6 a.m. Eastern Time, and so everyone thought that our team woke up at like 3 a.m. and wrote the newsletter. Obviously, most people who write newsletters and release in the morning, most of that work is done the night before.

So we would typically set the newsletter at 9, 10, 11 p.m. the night before, and then our writers would always wake up early before the newsletter went out to make sure. The worst thing you could do for a news source is something breaks overnight, and then when everyone gets your email in the morning, it's already out of date.

And I've been waking up early as well. So me and the editor would always wake up and be awake for either the gym or just the check-in on the news. And there were definitely a few mornings where we had to make some swaps of last-minute updates.

But yeah, we would take our backpacks all through New York. It was actually pretty hilarious. The core Morning Brew squad, we'd always go to the happy hours or events during the week, kind of like living in New York, it's like a 24, 25-year-old.

And we would be invited to these nice VIP dinners, network with a bunch of people, and we'd pull out our laptops in the middle of dinner just to set the newsletter when it was done so we could actually enjoy ourselves and not focus on this outstanding task.

But yeah, it was very scrappy early day startup type stuff.

Yeah. But I mean, you guys created such a cool brand in really only a few years,right? What do you think, what was the magic sauce behind it? I mean, you grew from a couple hundred thousand, a hundred thousand,right, to a few million.

What's the secret sauce?

Yeah, I think it was just the it was all in the writing, honestly. I think traditionally, people who would get these morning news updates or followed business news would read The Bloomberg Terminal or Yahoo Finance or CNBC, and it's very buttoned up, it's very Wall Street, it's very old school.

And what Morning Brew does and did was the first writers had no background in journalism. I think that's why we succeeded as well. Our first few writers actually didn't have a journalism background, and they were just taking stories that were interesting to them, that they thought our core demographic should be interested in, and then change the content from "here's what happened in the news" to "let me talk about it as if I was telling this to my best friend."

And we'll add jokes, we'll add pop culture references, we'll make it like a light read. And I think that is kind of breaking the barrier from covering serious recent events and news and business topics, but making it fun and enjoyable to read and mixing in jokes.

That conversational tone, I think, was very novel at the time, at least at that scale. And so when you would read Morning Brew, it would come off as, "This is my best friend telling me the news and making me laugh, and it's something that I actually look forward to," versus, "I guess I have to read Yahoo Finance to do my job and be up to date on the recent events."

And so I think that's where we got a lot of fandom and brand affinity in the early days.

That's what I actually loved about the product. It was fun. It was cheeky. It was interesting, and you actually want to read it every day versus the other kind of boring legacy media newsletters you kind of read. It's just like, "Oh, that's the same thing."

But what I love about the morning,

the kind of the whole story is it grew so quickly, but also you guys eventually got acquired. And I know you leftright a couple months after kind of it got acquired. What happened there and any regrets?

No regrets at all. So again, I joined as a second employee. There were three of us at the time, four of us, and there was just so much white space. We were building, I got to build the newsletter, I got to build the website, we built the referral program, we built a content management system for the writers to use, we built the ad management platform for the sellers to be able to sell these ad deals to all of these different brands and monetize and etc.

So there was a lot of white space when I joined. Three and a half years later, a lot of that white space had already been built, and we were kind of optimizing the website. And we were just at a different inflection point.

Again, I didn't know that we were about to get acquired. And so the writing on the wall was, again, maybe slightly out of arrogance, but I didn't want to be hired over. I kind of felt like I knew the industry, the space, the product, and the company better than anyone, and I didn't want to get hired over for a more polished VP of product.

And so part of it was arrogance and I wanted to be more in build mode. And so I got an opportunity to join YouTube and work on YouTube Music, which is almost like the complete opposite. And from my career trajectory, it was I saw a small startup go from three people to 35 people and less than a million in revenue to 25 million in revenue.

Google and YouTube is the total opposite. It's an absolute behemoth machine. And I kind of backed into doing product management. When I joined Morning Brew, I had no idea what product management was, and Google was kind of like the gold standard or so I was told of product management.

So from a career trajectory, it was like, "Okay, this was an amazing experience, got my feet wet, saw early startup. Now let me see how the sausage is made at scale." And so I knew I wasn't going to love it.

I spent two months at YouTube, but yeah, that was kind of like the reasoning behind wanting to leave. And no regrets. I think it worked out for everyone. And yeah.

And this is where the founding story of kind of Beehiiv started. Take us back to the early days. I mean, we see so many founders, an amazing idea, hustling, grinding like 24/7. And I think where you guys are super lucky, A, you had the kind of experience of building a huge newsletter, but also just looking back, the infrastructure for creators back then was so bad.

So why did you want to, first of all, tackle this space? And what was the founding story of Beehiiv?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it, again, came out of the Morning Brew story. So the beautiful thing about email is anyone can read and reply to an email. And we actually, part of nurturing and building this brand at Morning Brew was we would respond or read.

The early days it was me and another writer who would read the email responses. Eventually, we had a college intern basically going through the inbox. And it was great to get insights and feedback from stories that people thought were too political or they didn't like, or like, "Hey, this section's a little dry, you should switch it up."

So we were constantly getting feedback from our readers to make the newsletter and product better. And one of those subsets of email replies that we would always receive was, "How did you build the referral program? How are you growing so quickly?

How did you create this email template?" So they were kind of curious of the inner workings of Morning Brew because they were either trying to launch a newsletter or they worked at a publisher or media company or were like a hobbyist and just admired Morning Brew.

And so that got forwarded to me frequently. And eventually, I couldn't keep up and respond to all of these, but it was basically like a market signal of people wanted what we had because there clearly wasn't something in the market that would allow you to seamlessly accomplish what Morning Brew had accomplished.

So that was kind of the impetus and where the seed was planted of like, "Oh, what we built here is actually special and something other people want." I actually pitched it to Austin and Alex at Morning Brew to build in-house.

And I was unaware that they were already kind of deep in acquisition talks and kind of a curveball to be like, "Hey, we're also launching a SaaS platform." So I don't blame them, but I tried to pitch that we should white label the tech.

And so that was kind of like the initial ideas of or at least the acknowledgment that what we had built was interesting to other people. And then when I left, I had a week in between my job at Morning Brew and my job at YouTube.

I got sick with COVID, so I was stuck in my room in Brooklyn, couldn't do anything, wasn't that sick, but was isolated, and I just can't sit still. So I was kind of thinking like, "What could I be building or working on in this week off?"

And the idea of like, "Oh, what we actually had built was really special. We've always talked about maybe bringing it to more people." So I called my now co-founder, Ben, who was the first engineer I had ever hired at Morning Brew.

And I was like, "What do you think about building this, but for anyone to be able to plug in and use?" And his initial reaction was like, "Kind of crazy thought because it just took us three and a half years to build this."

And it's like a very daunting task and more complicated if it's for anyone, not just our internal employees. But eventually, after enough convincing, he's like, "Let's see if we can get Jake involved," who was his best friend and his best, smartest engineer that he knew.

And that became kind of like the founding of we would meet weekly starting that fall. We built out a roadmap of like, "This is what our MVP in v1 was." And we just balanced our full-time jobs. So them at Morning Brew and me at YouTube, and then nights and weekends, we would work on Beehiiv and just build this product.

And then 10 months later, so the summer of '21, we raised the seed round and then went full-time shortly after that.

Wow, that's crazy. And it's just so hard to think. It's like, "This isn't even the last four, five years,right?" So it's almost like it just happened so quickly.

Yeah, super quickly. We started building the fall of 2020, nights and weekends, not our full-time job. We got fundraising in the summer of '21 and then went full-time like August, September of 2021. So it hasn't been full years, four years.

That's crazy. And so the initial Azure product, what did you guys first focus on? And something founders always want to try and win as quickly as possible is having those first few hundred customers. How did you find them?

Yeah, so twofold. One was at the time, Twitter felt like it was like peak 2020, 2021. So everyone was building stuff, launching things. It was like peak Zurp era. And I didn't have a big following at all, maybe 2,000, 3,000 followers, but I basically using, again, the fact that Morning Brew was such a great success story, using that as a data point as like, "This is what we had built, and now we're building it for everyone."

And so I posted some tweet that summer basically being like, "This is what I've been up to. We're building a platform that allows you to do X, Y, Z, basically Morning Brew in a box." And it was at the time, Substack had already launched maybe three, four years sooner, and you're starting to see more and more people adopt email newsletters.

From that tweet, I think we got 400, 500 people to submit a quick form that basically just said, "Name, email, the platform they're using now, size of their list." So that was our initial target list and also validation when we raised the seed round that there are people interested in this.

And then when we raised our seed round, we had social leverage was the main check, but we raised from about 15 to 20 angels. And a lot of those angels were strategically chosen because they already had an email.

So Liquidity, the meme account, has his newsletter Exec Sum. Brian Morsey has his newsletter. A lot of these other early investors already had a newsletter on a different platform. And the goal was after they are financially incentivized to move over to our platform after they invested and they became some of our earliest users.

That's awesome. So the initial Azure product, it was just an email send, or were there some other products you had kind of added on? What was the initial product?

Yeah, initial product was you log into what is now a hilariously bad CMS, but we've obviously made it a lot better. V1 was not great, but you basically publish and you have your website blog where it would publish to the web, and then it would send out a basic email newsletter simultaneously.

So it was web and email. There was very little customization over both web and email, but it kind of was like a foundation. Some nice metrics and analytics. And one of the first features we built was the referral program because that was kind of, and I think over time, referral programs and email have become less effective, but that was the killer thing at Morning Brew.

It drove over a million subscribers for us at Morning Brew. Everyone was aware that it was like a massive growth lever, but it was hard to set up and build yourself, or you could use off-the-shelf tech that was pretty whack.

And so the fact that we bundled that in, everyone's like, "Oh, Morning Brew is amazing. They grew with this referral program. I can sign up for Beehiiv and get that same referral program." So that was kind of the initial product, and obviously, we've been shipping product every few weeks since then.

I love your product building. We're going to dive into that. But just going back to what you said, you have 400, 500 people who signed up just for one tweet. That's crazy.

Yeah, maybe 300, 400, but yeah. And granted, not all of them converted,right? That became, and this is before, it's like the meme tweet, whatever you call it, meme of like mid-tweet meme. I don't even know what the hell I mean, but basically.

Some something.

It's basically one of those two ends of the spectrum,right? It's like the, and then the guy in the middle that overcomplicates everything. And it's like just email them and ask them to sign up for the platform. And I didn't stand up like some sort of automated clay automation and funnel to get these people onto the platform.

Every day I'd wake up and I'd email everyone on that list being like, "Hey, you said that you were interested in this. We just launched. You want early access?" I think we eventually got 150 of those 400 people to sign up for the platform.

And so that was kind of our first few months. And funny enough, every now and then, I'll get a response today from people who got that email back in 2021. So we're still converting off that initial list.

That's pretty cool. And actually, 150 of 300 to 400, that's still pretty good.

Yeah, and because we were also grossly underpriced initially, we had an all-inclusive plan for $99 where you could send as many emails as you want as long as you were under 100,000 subscribers. So you could send hundreds of thousands of emails per day, potentially, and you get the website builder and you get the referral program.

It was such a good deal, and it caused some pain later in moving to a better pricing model. But I'd say looking back, I think a lot of our success was that it really was a no-brainer. The product at the time was okay, not exceptional, but it was good enough.

And with the price point and the value prop and the credibility from the Morning Brew story, it was enough to get people in and not have to think twice about pricing. So yeah, I think that's why a lot of people moved over in the early days.

There's also a no-brainer,right? Okay, you have Substack, but if you look at the legacy platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo,right, they're expensive. And as soon as you have all, I think it's over 2,500 subscribers, this is not just a few hundred dollars, it starts to get to thousands,right?

So it's kind of a no-brainer.

Yeah, and we still see that bifurcation today. When you have a competitor in the market that is free and kind of undermining the entire market, granted, it's a different business model, but it adds pricing pressure on that side.

But when you remove Substack from the equation, and Substack's a very basic platform for what they do, it's simple intentionally. For the more sophisticated users who need the automations and the API and the webhooks and the customization, the market is these email 1.0 players, and they're very expensive, and they're very antiquated.

And so that's a market we went after pretty hard initially and still go after this day.

I think what you guys have done in the last few years is awesome. And what I actually especially like is your presence at all the creator conferences. I met some of your colleagues at Bitcoin, for example, in LA a few months ago.

But something I often think a lot about for creator economy platforms is positioning. How is Beehiiv positioning your product? Because from an outsider, I kind of feel you've got the creator lens, but also you have the more B2B chasing companies,right, for them to use you guys as kind of their newsletter.

Is that fair? Is that kind of how you're positioning?

Yeah, and I think we're in an interesting stage of growing up and kind of even redefining who we are and what we stand for because we are appealing to a lot of these B2B companies. A lot of them are reliant on this antiquated email software, and we can do so much more for them within our ecosystem.

But we also kind of started off and we serve, so the problem is we serve these content creators or influencers or independent journalists incredibly well. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we also serve these massive B2B companies and publishers like Time exceptionally well as well.

And those are two completely different ICPs at two different ends of the spectrum,right? So how do we redefine what we can do and what we can offer? And we also acquired a website builder and released that about a month ago.

It's extremely powerful. And I think we can compete with WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, etc., which is a whole nother dimension to add on to who are we, what do we do, and how do we serve our users. So we're definitely growing up now and kind of redefining that exact question.

But what I think we do better than anyone else is we can simplify a company or creator's entire tech stack into having email and website and automations and monetization all under one roof. And I think that the fallacy, although it's historically been fairly true, is when you try to be everything to everyone, you end up just having a bunch of 4 out of 10 offerings, and specialization is great.

And what I'm working on and my goal is to challenge that of can we actually be 9 out of 10 in both website and email and automations and monetization. And if we can actually make it so each one of those pieces is truly exceptional, I think we can kind of buck that trend and really be the operating system for anyone who has an audience.

And so that's kind of the direction that we're moving in.

I think the small approach you guys have done is you've almost gone from the top-down approach,right? So you've got the distribution first. You've got some amazing customers, which they hopefully love you and do. And now you can start offering all these products versus other competitors coming in.

They start with the opposite ends, build these products, and then kind of work their way up. So I think that's really cool.

And I always say that to the team,right? I think that we're going to see a lot of consolidation in the creator space, but I think us starting with email first. And so we own the distribution. And I'd argue email is actually harder than most of these other offerings in the creator space that I think we are better competitively placed than almost anyone in the industry.

And we can just as easily go into website, link in bio, digital products, much easier than I think they can come into email and own distribution. So I feel really good about where we are in the market.

So some of your demos for the website builder, this is TypeDream,right? It was a former YC company. You guys acquired them, was it last year?

Yeah, so summer of last year.

Nice. The founders are super cool. They're going through YC now, building a cool company. We've actually just backed them, so super excited to see what they do. Yeah. What's happening kind of just in the wider newsletter space, especially I've seen in the last 6 to 12 months, so many people are now launching newsletters, especially from the creator lens.

Is this just, are we in kind of a hype cycle? Where do you think the newsletter space goes next for creators?

Yeah, very topical. We were just chatting before this about my newsletter that I put out today. And so it's very top of mind for what I wrote about today. But essentially, I think when you look at the media landscape and just information broadly, the trade for the past several decades was if you publish content, Google will index it, they'll rank it, they'll drive traffic to your website, and they'll help you monetize with page views with AdSense and everything.

And then there was a time where Facebook and Twitter were incredible for distribution. So content creators would go and post frequently on Facebook and Twitter, hoping people would click through, land on their website, and monetize with ads. And what happened was all of those platforms where publishers and content creators built this dependency realized as much as they can give distribution, they can also take it away.

So in 2018, Facebook changed their algorithm and deprioritized content from brands and publishers and tanked traffic overnight, basically to brands like BuzzFeed and a bunch of those types of publishers. Twitter deprioritized links in 2022. And then Google with AI summaries are basically cutting traffic 40, 50% to publishers.

So the model of depending on platforms that drive traffic has totally deteriorated. And during that time, the companies that have had a ton of success, so it's Morning Brew, Axios, The Hustle, The Skim, Politico, Punch Bowl News, what they all have in common is they actually are email-first media companies.

And so they own their distribution. They get people to sign up for their newsletter. They publish content. Their entire distribution receives it. And they can monetize them many different ways. So they can monetize with ads in the newsletter.

They can drive traffic back to their website to monetize with ads there. They could do paid subscriptions. They can monetize with affiliate. They could have paid communities. They could push products in the email. And so I think you've seen that email is a winning distribution channel that also diversifies away from these big platforms and the algorithmic feeds.

And so as people open their eyes to that, platforms like us and Substack have been introduced to basically make the barriers to entry zero, where anyone can have an idea for a newsletter as they're listening to this podcast and launch it in 20 minutes on our platform and have a website, a newsletter, distribution, automations, everything, and start monetizing tomorrow.

So I think it's kind of like the confluence of those macro trends with the tech that's now available to bring down the barriers and then the success stories that you're seeing from independent content creators that's kind of made this perfect storm.

And I think the most sophisticated content creators have learned that they can't be dependent on one single channel, but they go multi-channel. So yes, there are some email-only content publishers and creators, but I think most of these creators, they have a presence on YouTube, they have a podcast, and they also have an email, and they make money from all of them.

And so I think that's what we're seeing happen.

That's super interesting. That's actually why we launched a podcast show as why we're doing different forms of media. As quite a few of us in the creator space honestly think about, okay, if you have an amazing newsletter, we're massively focused on brand equity now over the next couple of years.

Even if you have amazing brand equity and you have all these AI summaries, are people going to read newsletters in the next few years?

Yeah, I mean, that's what we're betting on,right? And so I think there will be another bifurcation of the type of content,right? So the aggregation of news that's happening in sports, politics, business, whatever, maybe summaries actually provide more value there, where my deep dive pieces on my thoughts around building the company or our stories or insights around building in public, whether it's Ben Thompson's thoughts and analysis on the tech industry, I think there will always be a place for long-form content and even short-form content and aggregation.

I'm sure there will be other entrants in the market of ways that Google improves their Gmail product around AI and other third-party types of software, inbox software that comes to market. I don't think everything will be exactly the same, but I still think there will be a premium on long-form content and hearing stories and the written word.

So that's what we're betting on.

Fingers crossed. Something I love about you guys, though, is, A, you do everything in public. You ship products incredibly quickly. I think it's like once every few weeks,right? You publish all of your investor updates online, I think, like a few months later.

What's the risk of building in public? Because there's always two sides. One, you can show the amazing progress, which works really well for companies, but then is there not sometimes a feeling that this is getting too much?

I don't feel that pressure. I think the argument that you can make against building in public is if you are conveying what you're building, the success you're having, you will attract other people to emulate or mimic what you're building, try to steal strategies or customers or whatever.

We've basically just made the bet that I think we can out-execute everyone and that we could basically say what we're going to build and how we're going to benefit our users and that we can do it better than the competition.

And to date, that's been proven correct. And I think we're only getting better. Our team is continuing to grow. We're getting better and faster and more polished at everything that we do. I think it was maybe even riskier at the earlier days when literally anyone could have come, raised more money, hired a team faster than we did, and out-execute us.

I actually think where we are now is actually a pretty well-defended competitive advantage. But yeah, I mean, the way that I think about building in public is, one, me as an entrepreneur and founder, it's the type of content that I love and that I wish that I had, one, growing up or while building the company.

It's so valuable to learn from the mistakes of other people rather than having to make them yourself. And so having this very transparent look into other businesses, I think, would have saved me a ton of headache and mistakes.

Two is, obviously, creating content and building distribution and having a following and fan base is amazing. The entire creator economy is built off of that. You can see these creators building distribution and pushing products and driving revenue for their business.

So there's clearly value in creating content. And if I only created content about email newsletters, there's a market for that, but it's not that big. But if I create content around building a business, entrepreneurship, founders, scaling a startup, the market for that is massive.

It's anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur, who's currently a founder, who's at an early-stage startup. And so just thinking, working backwards from where can I create the most valuable content that's as high leverage, the building in public angle has worked extremely well.

And then again, I think most people are afraid to be incredibly transparent and share the true what's happening behind the scenes, good and bad, the real metrics, the real growth tactics. And because I am not, it definitely stands out in being extremely transparent and a very real look of how we're building that business.

And so that's been, from a competitive advantage on the content side of things, something that I think we've done pretty well.

It's also incredibly good for the brands,right? You mentioned the transparency, but also just that relationship the fans or creators have with Beehiiv. If anybody hasn't checked out Big Desk Energy, Tyler's newsletter, you should subscribe. We'll put it in the show notes below.

But I completely get it. I've read every single one of your newsletters, I'm pretty sure. And it's super transparent, it's funny, it's direct. And you share some cool things like your first pitch decks, shareholder updates, like you mentioned, and just super cool.

Yeah, I just put up an email I got to a response that I got this morning. Someone replied, "Someone should study Beehiiv as the how to build a cult-like following. I read these emails and get a warlike mentality against Mailchimp and Substack, and I'm not even an employee."

So that type of fandom and building a cult following, which granted, my goal is not to build a cult, but I think there's no greater compliment in being a content creator than saying that you can build a cult-like following.

Those eventually convert to customers or being top of mind for people who can recommend us to their friends or their network. So it really does start to compound. And the newsletter has been one of the highest leverage things that I've done, for sure.

That's crazy. What I also love is your spicy takes on the competition. You're not afraid to speak up, shall we say?

And I think part of that is, again, what is a content competitive advantage? It's like doing the things that if everyone feels in uniform that this is how you play business, you stay within the boundaries, you always wear a suit and tie, you never talk about competition, you never speak like this in public.

When you can zag when others zig and be like, actually, when our competitors are fucking up or doing something that screws over their users or we think that we have a better product or a better offering and being unapologetic about owning that.

Again, I think it turns off maybe one in 10 people, and that's fine. You don't need to appeal to everyone. But I think if you stand for something and can differentiate your content and the tone and voice that we go about doing things, I think that we've proven has worked really well for us.

So I feel good about our strategy.

I think the whole newsletter platforms is kind of like in this inflection point,right? When I think of the newsletter platforms, really they're only two to three. Like Kit.com has kind of been around for a while, Substack obviously, and there's kind of you guys.

And we can keep this question completely open. I mean, are you friends with these newsletter kind of founders? Do you guys actually speak? Have you ever been on the same panel?

No, I don't think I'm not a big fan of either of them, and I don't think they're a huge fan of me. So maybe because it's like the voice and the way that I've gone about building the business and kind of talking about the competition, as you alluded to.

But no, I mean, there's been, again, I guess you have to, I definitely wear my emotions on my sleeve. And I'd say this business is my entire life and livelihood. My entire wealth is tied up in the success of this business.

I've sacrificed a ton to build it to where we are today. And there were times in the journey where each of them did something to either try to steal our users in what I thought was a kind of below-the-belt way or just something else scummy marketing-wise.

And again, it's my entire livelihood and my baby. And so I take it personally. And so the competition, I think, is very real. And I think we're building the best product in the market. I'd love to take all of their customers.

And that's 100% the game plan.

All funny stories like this, they also have insane challenges, but they've also had those moments which it's just like, shit, are we going to die? And I think this was in your first, maybe first few months, first year, when I think you were on a stag do somewhere.

And was it GoDaddy? They shut down the website.

Yeah, we've had a few post-wars. That was one of them. Classic startup lore of very stressful, existential at the time, and then something that we can laugh about afterwards. But yeah, basically at the time, we used GoDaddy as our DNS provider.

And we host all of our users' websites, essentially. So when you have an account on Beehiiv, you can use other website builders, but we by default host your website. And you can choose to use our website builder or use your own.

And for whatever reason, we never had an account manager or a customer relationship with them. It was just a default vendor that we used. So we were like a no-one to them. And there might have been a phishing link sent from one of our tens of thousands of users, which they flagged their security team.

They found us as the source. And so they just started shutting down the Beehiiv.com domain, which then took down all of our users' websites as well, which is as bad as it can be,right? There's mistakes that we make, and we will ship bugs every now and then that impact our users.

But what's worse is when it impacts our users' users, like the readers, because then they have a bad reputation of who is this newsletter or this content creator whose website or newsletter doesn't work whatsoever. And our users are helpless because they didn't actually do anything wrong.

That was our fault. So those are the worst mistakes we can possibly make. And yeah, GoDaddy, I was at a bachelor party. It was the first time I had taken time off, literally, in the year and a half that we started the company.

And we just start getting notices that all of our websites are slowly getting taken down, and we couldn't figure out why. And then when we did, GoDaddy doesn't really provide hands-on support. We don't have an account manager. So we went through at 11:00 PM on a Saturday through their chatbot to get escalated to their team in India to get to a supervisor and eventually resolved it at 3:00 AM and then moved off of GoDaddy the next day.

But yeah, that was a pretty existential moment, I'd say.

How every founder is going to have this holy shit kind of moment. Any lessons that that kind of moment taught you? I kind of feel like although it feels really bad in the moment, things always work out at some point, normally.

Yeah, that's kind of like the mentality you kind of have to have. Definitely some funny chats happening during that time as it was like existentially, you kind of have to make light of the situation. But we also didn't hold back.

Every stone that we could turn over, we did. So I sent out an email at like 11:00 PM on a Saturday to our entire investors list. One of the funnier emails I've ever sent in retrospect, but like a total code red.

Does anyone know anyone at GoDaddy who knows these few people? We looked up their contact information of the C-suite and all of the leadership at GoDaddy and was trying to make calls and cold emails. We were networking however, which way we can to figure out how to get in contact with an actual human that could reverse this decision and fix us.

And it eventually worked, but it was quite chaotic. And yeah, it was pretty terrible.

Yeah, I can imagine. I would have probably tried to email to all the founders of the company. This is of GoDaddy. Try and put in all the emails into iMessage to see if any of them actually go through, FaceTime them.

But it sounded like it got us all this pretty quickly.

Yeah, well, not quickly. The longest six hours of my life. But yeah, I would say the one takeaway, I mean, there's probably a few takeaways, but the one lesson from that is, I guess, as a founder, understanding where your platform dependencies are.

We're built on Stripe,right? If Stripe goes down, I think most of the internet goes down. But that's a huge platform dependency for us today. Our DNS provider is another one. Our database provider, kind of understanding where those platform dependencies are and ideally having an actual human relationship with an email and a phone number for any of those.

So in the event that something does go wrong, you can actually get in contact with someone whose job it is to help you. And I don't know. But prior to that, we're just building. We're trying to grow as quickly as possible.

I'm not really thinking about worst-case scenarios for every vendor, but you kind of do at some point need to understand and have a personal relationship.

Yeah, this is where having a great team comes into play. And over the years, you guys have built, I think, a really cool team, kind of over the years. I think you have well over 100 people now, all remote.

Yeah, we're about 100, exactly.

Yeah. What do you think is the hardest part of being a CEO that nobody warned you about?

Yeah, it's a great question. Well, one is, obviously, everything's going to go wrong at some point. And just being every day is totally unique. And understanding that my job is almost like solving problems while also trying to carve out enough time to paint a picture and a roadmap of where we're going.

And then also, none of your days ever go how you expect. So when I wake up on a Tuesday, I already have my list of, here's the 10 things that I want to get done. But the time that I'm on Slack and see that this broke, this customer's upset, something else happened, we have a huge enterprise opportunity, but they want me to join the final call.

My day gets flipped upside down pretty much every single day. And you initially fight it, and you're kind of like, you get stressed out very easily. It's like, hey, I already had a full day of 10 things to do, and now it's 4:00 PM, and I haven't done any of those 10 things.

And that's like a very stressful and anxiety-inducing situation to live your life day after day. And even when you tell yourself, it's going to be like this all the time and just get used to it, it's still very hard to get used to that.

So I'd say that's always been difficult for me. I know that that's going to happen every single day when I wake up. I'm surprised when it doesn't. And just getting used to the uncomfortable of the unknown and that you have to be flexible and lean in wherever you can possibly provide value sounds so simple.

But when the other 10 things that I'm ignoring and neglecting are actually super high priority, it's very stressful. I'd say the other thing that is hard, and we've done a really good job with this, is when we first started, it's me and my two co-founders, and 100% of our time is focused on the customer and building product and making the lives of our customers better.

And everyone's so motivated, whether they're working Friday nights, weekends, we're all in and trying to build this. And as you build a team, less of my time and our founders' and other leaders' time is actually spent on the customer.

It's spent on company building. So whether it's processes and one-on-ones and reviews and different document reviews and finance and accounting, there's all this shit that kind of bubbles up, which is like two or three degrees removed from actually focusing on the customer.

And so that has been interesting. And realizing that that's happening and trying to remove those things and get as much of my time focused on the customer. And then the flip side of that is, at 100 employees, some people, it's more of a 9-to-6 job than it is their passion.

And it just naturally happens when you get past 50 or 60 employees. And so my job of trying to figure out how do we motivate everyone to be as bought in? And maybe they aren't spending all Saturday and Sunday working like we were in the early days, but to care and go the extra mile, even if your employee is 70, 80, 90, that's like a lesson in storytelling and motivating and then aligning incentives for everyone.

And it's harder to do when you're remote,right? So if we're all in the office and we're all celebrating the wins together, and then we hit a big milestone and we go to happy hour, and then you can kind of feed off of the energy of everyone else, it's probably easier to be able to do that in a remote environment where everyone's in different time zones and different countries trying to share the wins and keep everyone equally as motivated is probably one of the more difficult things.

Do you think if you were to restart Beehiiv tomorrow, would you do remote or in-person?

I'm a huge advocate for remote. I think we wouldn't be where we are if we weren't remote. Now we're at the point where, one, there's like 24/7. When I'm up late on the West Coast, your team's coming online, and I can hand off things to them and talk to them as they're starting their day.

When I'm asleep, they're working. When the East Coast team wakes up, the European team's already handing off stuff. So we do have this amazing flywheel of 24/7 around the clock, things are getting done. We have engineers in every region, as do we have other teams.

So that's super beneficial. I hate commuting more than anything. I think it's like the worst thing in the world to have to sit in traffic or drive 30, 40 minutes each way. So the time that other companies are spending commuting, I'm just working or getting caught up or doing whatever.

I think that's super valuable. And then when we open up a job, being able to hire the absolute best person for that job, regardless of where they live, instead of finding someone who's 30, 40 minutes from one of our offices, I think it's another huge competitive advantage.

So yes, when we do our annual team offsites, it's amazing having the camaraderie and people being in the same room and working together. And yes, I definitely obviously miss that. And I'd also argue for the time that you're there together, you're probably accomplishing more.

But I think all of the other trade-offs of being remote and being able to hire a global workforce far outweighs that.

I think this newsletter space is just so exciting. It feels like we're just in the next stage of a massive opportunity for content creators. I'd love to get your take before we jump onto the trends, but it feels like there's an opportunity for some newsletters to start getting acquired again.

Do you think this is going to happen over time?

You're just saying more acquisitions broadly in the ecosystem?

More acquisitions for newsletters themselves, so like the hustle, Morning Brew, and so on.

Yeah, I actually think so. That's like a new thing that we're really focusing on as well, which is I think the HubSpot acquisition of the hustle was brilliant. And I think HubSpot is exceptional at their marketing and being able to generate leads and drive conversions.

And it's because they're very sophisticated and not just going for the direct response of, "Here's an ad to sign up to a $50,000 a year CRM solution," because no one wakes up and decides they want to spend $50,000 on a CRM solution.

So they acquire the hustle, which speaks to their ICP. The hustle now has 100% share of voice of ads promoting HubSpot. They're talking to founders and tech people who are building their companies. And every single day you read the hustle, you're getting value from it.

You like the writers, you like the content, and you're being softly promoted HubSpot. So when the day does come that you need to buy a CRM, HubSpot's top of mind. And they've been in your face every day in every newsletter for the past six months.

And so they're playing the long game, and it's a much more sophisticated funnel of user acquisition and retention. And if they wanted, they could even monetize it. So they're actually making money off of this funnel that they're creating rather than just promoting HubSpot.

And they probably do monetize it. And so that's all to say, I think if there are newsletters who are writing to CFOs and accountants, why would Ramp or Brex not want to acquire them to get that audience of CFOs and that they're driving value via content and pushing them down funnel?

And I think we'll see, one, larger media companies and newsletters acquire other newsletters to grow faster, but also software platforms and more sophisticated just companies acquire distribution and leads through email.

I think this is very exciting. And the whole newsletter space, I still think it's super early, but also there are so many products that all platforms could be building. The Amazon Audio Store is super old-school. Do newsletter platforms start building that?

We mentioned acquisitions as a channel for that. So I think it's just a really exciting time to be a content creator and a newsletter.

Yeah, I think it's only getting better because I think the tech historically has been pretty weak. And hopefully, that we've built really excellent product. And I think our product, one, in the past three to four months is really elevated, and we're really just getting started.

So I think as we get more resources, as we continue to build this foundation, I think what will be possible with email is going to unlock a lot more opportunities for these different creators.

Totally. One of the parts of the show that we love to talk about is the next big tech trends. We mentioned we're kind of at the cycle now in technology, where there are so many opportunities cropping up. But I think one really exciting opportunity is around health and wellness.

And I know you're deeply passionate about it. And honestly, you are actually the best-prepared guest who's ever come to the show, where you just sent me, I think, 10, 15 kind of trends around health and excited to kind of dive into them.

Yeah, let's do it. I was busy with ChatGPT last night doing my research, but yeah, I picked two things that I'm fairly passionate about and hopefully have some data points to share.

Awesome. Health, it feels like there are so many companies cropping up in this space across wellness, gut health, wearables. What are you most excited about this space? And what's got you kind of interested? What's piqued your interest in health?

Yeah, I think, well, I've always been growing up playing sports and very interested in health, eating healthy, etc. For me, I guess biohacking is theright term. And I know it's very popular in Silicon Valley. And I don't think I consider myself a full biohacker.

But the startup founder experience has elevated my desire to make sure that I feel amazing all the time. Becauseright now, I sit at my computer 14 hours a day. And there's no worse feeling for me than hitting that 2 o'clock slump where I'm tired and feel a little lethargic.

But I know that I have unlimited work to do. And it's just not benefiting me or the company or whatever. So it's become pretty apparent to me that if I want this company to be a multibillion-dollar business, I need to bring my A-game, be energized, focused, and feel incredible as much as I can.

So I've definitely taken a plunge in terms of health tech, monitoring the different types of supplements that I'm taking, monitoring my sleep very closely, making sure I'm eating healthy food, making sure that I'm at peak energy level as much as possible.

So I think that's kind of what got me into this space. And obviously, feeling good, looking good, everything is tangential and a part of that. But it really is kind of through the founder journey and the lens that I've taken towards health and wellness.

There are so many startups also just cropping up in this space, especially around brain health. I've come across some interesting companies in this space recently. There are all these wellness clubs cropping up now. One in LA,right? Remedy plays.

Other ship in New York, I think they mentioned they launched a few years ago.

And yeah, there's just so much happening in this health space. And especially when you look at the likes of Brian Johnson, who's like, "Just never die," it feels like health tech is kind of reemerging again.

Yeah. And so yeah, and when I shared some of the research I did, the one trend that a lot of people have seen of how few adults are drinking alcohol now and it happening more with Gen Z and this younger demographic.

So what is it? In the past decade, the number of eighth graders has declined alcohol by 50%, 10th graders 47%, 12th graders 40%. So just growing up in high school, where I think it used to be what you see in Hollywood of everyone just partying and boozing and whatever, even high school-aged kids are drinking less.

You're seeing all of these health and wellness clubs, whether it's Remedy Place or Other Ship or High Mad in LA. There's Third Space in London, where the alternative to going out to the bar and then the club and staying out till 3:00 AM, getting drunk, and then feeling terrible for the next couple of days, there's these sauna cold plunges wellness-type clubs where you get the social element without having to booze and feel terrible and destroy your body.

So there's definitely been this wave of Third Places. And then there's all of these content creators from Brian Johnson and Andrew Huberman and Casey Means that are kind of taking a scientific approach to studying what foods to be eating, what supplements to be taking, how to prioritize your sleep, just to feel better.

And I think that's also led to this explosion of people who are using psychedelics, people who are using THC and smoking weed rather than drinking alcohol. So all of that's kind of adding up to, I just think, a more health-conscious consumer across the world, really.

The trends that I looked at seem to be not just in the US, but across the world. And then, yeah, I think the tech companies and wearables are very interesting too,right? So while there's a supplement, there's a food space, there's the club and wellness alternative, but then there's also wearables.

I wear this Oura Ring. There's Apple Watch. There's Whoop. There's a bunch of other wearables that are kind of in production. So yeah, I think it's a really exciting time for that type of space.

Totally. And with the people drinking alcohol, even here in Asia, in Thailand, where is where I'm based, it's typically been a very heavy drinking culture. My friends don't drink anymore. There are lots of these wellness clubs kind of cropping up, especiallyice baths.

They're huge here. You can go and have anice bath for like $10, which for here is quite expensive. And actually, interesting, I met a company last week. They are a wearable for when you go to the loo, so gut health.

So essentially, it's just a product you kind of just put onto the bathroom. And once you've done, you're like, "Number one, number two," it will collect all the data, and they will demonstrate and show you what's happening in your gut.

I think that's really interesting.

Yeah, I think we're just moving to this space of what some call health 3.0, of typically the way that the entire ecosystem and industry is. You wait till you have an ailment or an ache. You go to a doctor, and they reveal through exams that you're totally fucked.

And there's something has been, whether it's your diet or something else that you've been doing, has been contributing to something negative in your body. And now that it's been building up for five or six years, it's actually too late to do anything.

And the entire industry is built around, "Here's medication or surgery to help undo what you've done or maintain it," where health 3 is really just preventative health. And if you can get insights about the insides of your body, the different levels of vitamins, minerals, things that are going well and things that aren't, you've also seen these companies like Function Health and Superpower kind of grow up where I'm literally getting my blood taken tomorrow for Superpower for the second time, where they have 100 different biomarkers.

And so the goal is, if you're testing these biomarkers year after year, you can see trends over time. And as soon as something spikes, which is concerning, you can actually action it before it kind of spirals out of control.

And you have to end up in the doctor and do whether the surgery or the preventative care. So yeah, I think it's a really exciting time. And I think it makes perfect sense in terms of why people would want to catch things sooner rather than after they've already developed some sort of issue.

Super interesting. And now people are not spending as much buying houses. People have a bit more disposable income,right? And it's kind of now the future of social is wellness, I'm a big believer in. There's actually this really interesting company called Hyrox.

Have you heard of them?

I don't recall if they do, but that name does actually sound pretty familiar.

Yeah, Hyrox. So basically, it's an intensity athletic competition.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, this place. So they launched seven years ago. They have 600,000 to 800,000 athletes competing each year. They only do like 80 to 90 events, and they make $140 million in revenue.

Yeah, no, yeah, all of those, like the Tough Mudder. It's kind of like a newer Tough Mudder type thing, but more competition.

Exactly.

Yeah, same. I think, and we're seeing, I mean, I think a lot of it's like the proliferation of the internet and content creation and reels and TikTok and just seeing what other people are doing. But these types of hobbies are just growing in popularity.

And I also wonder how much of it is, how many people now have side hustles relative to decades ago? And I think whether it's a good signal or a bad signal, bad signal being maybe because wage growth hasn't grown with inflation and everything else, and it's harder to get home ownership in the US and elsewhere.

People feel like they need a side hustle to generate more income to live the life that they want. Or maybe it's just aspirational because a lot of people don't like their jobs. And a side hustle is an opportunity to build something that they're passionate about.

But that's kind of the lens that I view it in, is maybe these people just want to be healthy so they can be more active and focused and feel better so they have the energy to pursue something that they're passionate about.

And since I've kind of gone on this health kick over the past few years, when I started the company, I'd still go out maybe two, three times a week. I would party a lot on the weekend. I'd recover on Sundays.

And now I don't have enough hours in my day or days in the week to do everything that I want and need to do. And so the thought of going out to my friends make fun of me all the time now.

Well, after dinner, if the night's not going to be like a 10 out of 10 night, I'm going home, getting my eight hours of sleep, and having an early morning the next morning. And yeah, I just wonder how much of the health and wellness trend is like.

One, there's more information that's available online around what you should be doing, what's trendy, what's good for your gut health, what's good for your sleep, and everything else. And then also just now being hungover is just the worst thing to me because I want to build and do so many ambitious things.

And laying in bed and feeling terrible just is the polar opposite of where I want to be.

Yeah. And I really like, even when I have a few beers, I mean, it just messes with your mind,right? You've got to have a healthy mind to kind of build what we're doing. So I think this whole space is going to change quite quickly.

Yeah, I think that's where I feel it as much too. I think I, what was it? I went out for a little bit on Saturday night. And Sunday is when I had to write the newsletter. And I know by Thursday, Friday, I'm in the zone, I'm mid-work week.

Every waking moment I have, I'm thinking about growth strategies, acquisition, product. I'm dialed in. And then when you take a little bit off, drink a bit, don't sleep as well, the clarity of my thought decreases very noticeably. And then also just my motivation.

I'm a little bit slower to make moves. And you're only really competing against yourself at that point. I see the opportunity we have in front of us. And I'm just doing a disservice to me to not be able to be in the best mental and physical state to perform.

So yeah, that's kind of how I the longevity stuff is cool. I don't do any of this because I want to live to be 140. If I can live to be 140 and be healthy, sure, I guess I'm open to it.

But really, it's just about how do I feel incredible today and just have the energy and motivation to be able to perform.

Yeah. If we want to build big companies, we have to stay focused, and we have to have healthy minds and be fit and healthy. So if you weren't building Beehiiv, and to kind of summarize all of these awesome trends, what kind of company would you start?

Yeah. So one, obviously, health and wellness is an industry that I'm very interested in. I think there's a lot of interesting space there. So whether it's clean water, clean air, I have an air purifier and a reverse osmosis water filter.

So I'm all in. But I think there's opportunity for I think you're starting to see, and it feels kind of like fringe conspiracy theory around electromagnetic waves in terms of reproduction and everything. So I've heard rumors of people being like, "I don't want to drive a Tesla or a Rivian because allegedly there could be some connect with reproduction type issues," which I haven't seen the science on that.

But I do think there's more a lot of these things that kind of start off conspiracy of like, "Oh, the food system's totally fucked. You can't trust it." It was very fringe before until now you actually look at how terrible a lot of the food and water is that we eat and drink.

And a lot of these fringe things actually start to enter the mainstream. The other one is Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. And some people who are very I'm not there yet, but a lot of people won't sleep by their phone or remove the router from their room that they sleep in because they think that these Wi-Fi waves could be negatively impacting health.

Again, I haven't seen the science. It's still fringe to me. But I could definitely see a world where there are more of these conspiracy theory fringe health things that we just don't have enough data and science to prove actually become studied a bit more.

There is actually some sort of correlation or opportunity there. It's a long-winded way of saying I still think there's a lot to do in the health and wellness space and a lot that you could build. And then the second trend that I gave you that I'm really interested in is kind of this general vibe shift from software to hard tech.

And I think after the iPhone was released, all of the cool companies, all of the VC-backed companies were building mobile apps. And you saw this explosion of Airbnb and Uber and DoorDash and these tech soft companies that kind of bridge software and IRL type experiences or just software.

And then you saw this wave of B2B software. And the coolest thing was to raise tons of money and build these software products to serve different consumers or businesses online. And I feel like just recently, there's been this huge shift in hard tech, whether it is robotics and manufacturing, whether it's defense and aerospace, whether it's electric vehicles or energy production, supersonic jets, like boom, just really hard engineering problems that people are trying to solve and then bring to the market.

And I know there's always been these kind of being built and to mix success. SpaceX has been around for more than a decade, obviously, huge success. But that was kind of the exception to the norm, and they weren't very mainstream outside of SpaceX.

But now I feel like all of the hottest companies are going after not just AI from the chatbot perspective and software, but how do we leverage AI and robotics to do things that were previously not possible physically? And so yeah, that's really interesting to me.

I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. Never had a job in mechanical engineering. I studied it. But I do think these hard tech problems and whether it's environmental tech or energy, it's just really cool to show up and build something with your hands that's physical and that you can do good with, whether it's selling to governments or better for the environment or whatever it is.

So I think those are two areas that I'm pretty passionate about that I think a big problem set that have a lot of opportunity.

This is your next company, maybe. Let's make Beehiiv number one first. Hopefully, unicorn. Maybe it'll go public at some stage. Who knows? And I think just what you guys have done in only really a short period of time is super amazing.

And I can't wait to see where you go next.

Yeah, focus is definitely Beehiiv for the time being. Honestly, whenever I join these podcasts and they ask for trends or things or other things I'm interested in, it's actually a very hard thing to do because I'll read a lot from newsletters, books, trends, whatever.

But I'm 99% of the day just super locked in on what we're building. And so getting outside of my day-to-day to actually think about what else is going is usually a distraction. Yeah.

Good stuff. We're super excited for you. Where can people find out more about you? People have to subscribe to the newsletter. Where can they find you? They have to.

Yeah. The newsletter, you can mail that bigdeskenergy.com. Hopefully, we can drop that in the show notes. But that's my weekly newsletter where I share everything about building the company and being a founder. Denk_Tweets on Twitter, pretty active there.

LinkedIn also fairly active. So those are probably the big three.

Awesome. Tyler, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much. And we can't wait to see where you guys go next.

Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.