Beehiiv’s CEO Breaks Down His Exact Newsletter Growth Playbook

Hey, it's Matt. And in this episode, I sat down with Tyler Dink, the CEO of Beehive. We talked about how Beehive has scaled to $20 million in annual recurring revenue, how to use Beehive as a platform. But we actually spent most of the time talking about things that Tyler doesn't really share very often. We dove into the side hustle he created, a newsletter called Big Desk Energy. We talked about how he got his first 1,000 subscribers, 10,000 subscribers, and how he since scaled it to over 120,000 newsletter subscribers. in two years and built a six-figure business on the side through beehive boost sponsorships and events and masterminds so tyler revealed all that stuff for us he also decided to share his media kit with us we'll put a link in the description to that below and he uses this media kit to sell sponsorships for five six seven ten thousand dollars per newsletter issue so if you want to see tyler's media kit and how he makes money from sponsorships click the link below and without further ado here is the conversation All right, Tyler, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining, man. Thanks for having me. I want to start by going into how you've built your audience. You kind of have like a really cool media newsletter side hustle that you've been working on. I think those learnings will apply to a lot of people. And we'll also talk about Beehive, how you grew it, how people can use it after that. But let's dive into that. So and then you have this newsletter on the side. Do you call it a newsletter? You talk about like a mini media company? I'd call it a newsletter. It actually might bring in more revenue than my full time job, which is funny. And I guess like the power of newsletters. But yeah, my investor actually just pinged me an hour ago saying, hey, your most recent BDE issue was incredible. I forget that you actually have like a full time job to do in addition to this. So it's definitely one of the more stressful things I do, just balancing time. And I'm happy to get into one, how I've grown it, the strategy and like there's a lot of reasoning behind it. A lot of people listen to this are like, I run a business or maybe I have a full time job and I'm trying to write a newsletter and build that as a side hustle or a way to grow my existing business. How do you actually manage your time to get out a newsletter every week and do all the other things you do with Big Desk Energy? Yeah, so I usually spend my weekends writing it. In an ideal world, I have this running list of different topics that I think are interesting that I'd like to eventually write about. In an ideal world, by Thursday, I write like a rough first draft that I can just keep going back and iterating. And I spend most of like Saturday and Sunday finalizing it. I'd say all in all, it's probably about a five to seven hour a week initiative to build this newsletter. uh definitely forfeited a lot of weekends in doing it but i think the upside's been been really incredible and you publish it on sunday is that right publish it every tuesday every tuesday okay so you have that kind of weekend going into the coming tuesday to get it done that's actually kind of how i started my newsletter schedule because i didn't have time and it was like i'm gonna do it on saturday and i end up like writing a draft or no outline or title thursday hopefully finish it by friday That can run into Saturday. So we have like a similar timeline there. Tell us about like who you're writing for. Who's the audience for Big Desk Energy? Yeah. So I guess it's worth taking a step back and kind of giving a bit more context of, I guess, what I had built in the content lens. And so. When I first launched Beehive, or even before launching Beehive, when it was just a side project on nights and weekends, I had maybe 5,000 followers on Twitter, maybe 10,000 on LinkedIn. So by no means was I a large content creator. In trying to scale and reach a wider audience of people who I think would be interested in what I'm building. One way to view it is like you have taken a very particular niche, which is mostly email newsletters and tangential topics. I debated going into that and being like the newsletter guy, obviously for behind and like what we're building, that'd be very relevant. But just widening the aperture, I figured if I could just write about building in public, whether it is how we hire, how we run meetings, how we scale the company, different milestones, different attributes and traits that we look for in different employees and hires. It kind of widens the aperture of people who would be interested in this content, not just people who could be our customers, but anyone who has a small business or startup who is interested in the stories and tactics to actually scale that company. And so dating back to 2020 is when we started building Beehive and the thesis was simple. I'm just going to post as much as I could on LinkedIn and X about what features we're building, why it's valuable, why users should care. which built this kind of like transparent built in public persona of people look to me as to understand exactly who we are as a business and what we're prioritizing because I'm very transparent about all of that. And so I did that for the first three years while building the company. And then the newsletter was really just kind of an evolution of that. It allows me to go much deeper than a 280 character tweet to have a 1500 word essay that I send every week. And so the premise of Big Desk Energy really is the behind the scenes tactics and stories as we're building the company with the hope that it inspires and helps other founders and entrepreneurs to launch their own companies. You're writing about stuff that really only you can share. I don't know if you thought about that when you started it, but that's a good strategy. We haven't talked about this on another conversation we had where it's like, AI can't replicate it. Other people could write about how they do email marketing or how they do. best practices for newsletters. But because like the newsletter is just building in public, more in depth, sharing things that work for you, sharing your wins and failures, it's a one of one. Whereas the niche strategy can work for some people. It's worked for me, but I like the way you approached it. Yeah, I think this was actually the topic of my newsletter today, so it's very timely. But the power of founder-led marketing, how I broke it down was, I think we're entering this world now where distribution is the real bottleneck. in the sense that SEO has been very professionalized. Paid spend on Google and Meta is very expensive and more competitive than ever. And that's why you're seeing all these companies invest in their own content marketing and telling stories. And that's like the whole rise of like the Wall Street Journal article that went viral of tech companies hiring storytellers for 200,000 plus dollars. which got mocked on X and whatever. It really is just like the shift from we can't just pay for distribution and we can't rely on Google because of AI and everything for distribution. So storytelling narratives is just a new lever that a lot of companies are leaning into. And I think it follows the thesis that people want to follow people more so than features and faceless brands. And so while most people probably couldn't name or identify. the founders behind MailChimp or any of these other like large ESPs that we compete with. I do think there's an inherent competitive advantage in being a face of a company that's very transparent about what's working, what's not working, what we're prioritizing and show that we really do care as a company. And so, yeah, this founder led marketing thing, I think, has helped one Beehive become a larger, more notable company, not just for the features and software that we offer, but because of the story and the narrative and the persona of I guess, me and the company and the characters that I built around it. And then trust is really like one of the biggest scarcities today. And when we've entered this world of AI, almost anyone can vibe code these different software platforms. So these platforms are being launched more quickly than ever before. And content has been commoditized because anyone with the access to the Internet can use ChatGPT to create all of this content. Then naturally, what value skews to is trust. And that's people that you can relate to or that you've seen provide value time and time again. And so I think we're just seeing this macro shift towards that given AI and everything else that's happening. Yeah, this founder led persona has helped a ton in trying to grow the company. Absolutely. I want to get into some of the like nitty gritty of how you've grown and monetize the newsletter, but even your audience in general. We can talk about that, too. When did you launch Big Desk Energy? Was it two years ago? Yeah, it was just about exactly two years ago. So January of 2024. was the first issue did you have a um launch plan or tactics that worked that got you to your like from zero to a thousand subscribers zero to a thousand yes but it's not like the most replicable i basically announced it in december and said once i get a thousand subscribers i will send my first issue of pigdesk energy which happened like i basically just kept promoting that every few days on x in linkedin and then launched it in january when i got my first thousand the very gritty tactics that actually got me from like let's say a thousand to ten thousand beyond just like creating a wait list was the night before so i send every tuesday so every monday i would preview what i'm going to write about the following day i think you've done this really well as well but basically showcasing hey this is a topic that i'm writing about if you want to be the first to find out about it subscribe here that would always trickle in a few dozen subscribes across different platforms every monday night And then Tuesday, I send the newsletter. I would synthesize what I just wrote and then post kind of like a summary that left out some key details. So if it was like the five things that we look for and what we hire a new employee at Beehive, I would list on Tuesday three of them and then say for the last two, click here to sign up to the newsletter. And then every post, which is a feature that comes out of the box on Beehive, is just an email gate, which sounds very simple. there's basically a few different ways you can collect emails on these different posts as you're scrolling everyone is familiar with like the pop-up box which is super annoying and you can just exit out and continue reading the content a more restrictive way is the email gate which basically lets you read like the first few sentences but you actually can't get past it without putting in your email so as i'm promoting the content that i'm creating i'm constantly driving traffic back to the post that i just sent and if they're willing and interested enough to click on x and linkedin this preview of what i'm writing the likelihood that they also put in their email to read the rest of the content is very high and so all of my posts have an email gate on it so there's like a few of like the early tactics in terms of like social hype the night before the recapping the day after using an email gate on all of the different posts. And then the referral program, something I've always had from day one. And one of the first projects I ever built at Morning Brew previous to building Beehive was the referral program. And you, of course, that sit very close to the newsletter ecosystem. Like, I think they have become a bit less effective and a bit sat over time. But that was like the killer growth lever for Morning Brew at the time between 2017 and 2020. And so every newsletter on Beehive has the ability to launch their own referral program. And so I've had one that has led to a few thousand subscribers as well. Yeah, and even if it's, I mean, that's a lot for a lot of people, but for you out of, how many subscribers is now? 80,000, 100,000 plus on your newsletter? Like 120? Yeah, it's like, it's passive, automated, really high quality subscribers. So even if it's 2,000 out of 100,000 or 2% of your list, no matter how big the list size, it's, you know, automated free growth that is. Like, we'll share your newsletter if other people, those signups are very monetizable and very engaged. But I love that. That's super actionable. I haven't, I can't think of anybody else who I've seen who's done the waitlist. I love the waitlist idea. And not everybody's going to be able to do that. Or maybe it's 100 instead of 1,000, right? But more people should do that for sure and just see if there's demand out there or if there's not, like tweak the topic or idea of the newsletter or how you talk about it and keep doing that. And then pre and post call to actions, there's like three people who actually do them. that I see and they always work. Yeah. In the early days, I think every newsletter at scale does paid acquisition. I think that to like be able to break through and actually really scale a newsletter to beyond 50 75 000 like you do need to put some capital into it but the early days when i was solely dependent on these different like gritty tactics like posting every monday and tuesday about the newsletter uh the referral program as you mentioned very uh on autopilot recommendations is like another feature i use at beehive i probably have grown five to ten thousand subscribers through recommendations through the platform i think the big thing that everyone wants to know is, how can I scale my list as quickly as humanly possible? And I think anyone who's been around the game long enough knows that there isn't ever a single silver bullet to do that. It really is the compounding effect of posting the night before gets you a few dozen, posting the day of gets you a few dozen. The recommendations will get you a few dozen a week. The referral program will get you an incremental few dozen. And then, you know, as you get better at posting your content and trying a few of these different strategies, one hits every now and then. And then once you add paid later in your journey, that's really like the accelerator where the few dozen you were getting on the recommendations or referral program turns into a few hundred at scale. I think that's my long winded way of saying there isn't really a silver bullet that I've seen unless you go crazy viral and are able to plug something that is like in that peak virality moment. otherwise it's really like this steady grind of 10 to 15 strategies that all get you a few subscribers that start to compound over time absolutely yeah there's there's not many it's all a gradual growth increase have you ever done comment to get post on linkedin i think you're mostly like your biggest following is on linkedin you've seen those right where it's like a little cheesy. I have one in my back pocket. I recorded something last week and I have the video I just haven't set up, whether it's like ManyChat or one of those platforms to like be able to do the whole like automation stuff. But yeah, I'm going to give it a try probably later this week or next week and see if it works. Yeah. It's hard to automate on LinkedIn, but that's how I grow mostly from LinkedIn. And I use like, I do that and I send people a DM with a link to a beehive email gated page i don't even set up like a dedicated landing page and that crushes it and i also do the same thing that you're doing pre-call to actions post-call actions yeah i mean another thing that i do which is is fairly gritty granite of like offset some of the grit by hiring someone to help me do this but as part of onboarding users give us there are typically users will upload their social channels And me trying to be this public CEO that really engages with our users, which I think is like our core competitive advantage is one that I am a user and two that I'm constantly speaking to our users. So I have a really good finger on the pulse of what features we should be building. One way that I do that is I collect everyone's X and LinkedIn and I connect with them. And so I have a VA that sends a LinkedIn request, which I've maxed out now, but an X request to follow every single new user on the platform. And then I also have them send a note to sign up to my newsletter. The hope is from the user perspective, they're like, wow, that's really cool that the CEO of this company that I just signed up for cares enough to connect with me on social. So it's kind of like a growth hack for the platform. And then I try to go one step further because my newsletter is all about building in public and sharing what we're building at Beehive. If I can get them to click on the link and sign up. Now I just have that much deeper of a relationship with them where they're now receiving my weekly newsletter and they're more bought into the vision of what we're building and have a deeper connection with me personally, which ideally leads to like more engaged readers on the newsletter front, but a more loyal user, hopefully on the beehive front. I love that. People are going to definitely need to use that. And also it could be done the other way around. Not everybody has, you know, a product, but like someone joins your newsletter, a lot of times from the email address you can. copy and paste into Google or tease out first name and last name and follow them, connect with them. And now you just have like a deeper relationship. And maybe you send a DM from a virtual assistant about like, thanks for joining my newsletter. And you just have another means of connection and you're just more memorable. So when you do show up in the inbox, you're more likely to get opened and so on and so forth. And it doesn't, obviously you don't have to have your own software platform to be able to like look at who's uploading social. As you're posting content on X and LinkedIn. naturally people have followers trickle in. There's like a bunch of different integrations you can set up where those followers load into a Google Sheet, which is what I do. I just share the Google Sheet with the VA and then have them send a DM to all of these people. And I think it's like, again, that probably gets me 15 to 25 new subscribers per week, but I've been doing it for 100 so weeks. So it's like a few thousand at this point. And that kind of starts to compound with the 10 other things that I'm doing for my newsletter. Yeah. And I think just being that much more memorable and making people feel like you care. because even though you're not doing it manually like you still care enough to set this up and pay people to do it and like you fall when they when they send you messages like you're actually responding to them i'm like not super active on instagram i'm still like old school on instagram where i post like one photo every like three months essentially but those who have leaned more into instagram and like reels obviously now that it's more algorithm driven and people are routinely posting videos and using instagram as kind of a growth channel which i haven't done There's a lot of automations you can set up with like ManyChat and a few of these other platforms where every time you get a new follower, it'll automatically send them basically the same thing. But you can set it up to send them a DM asking them to do whatever or sign up to your newsletter. Apparently, that's like a massive growth lever that a lot of people I know are using. I just haven't taken the plunge in creating like video content for Instagram. Yeah, it's crushing it for a lot of our clients, that exact thing and the LinkedIn thing, but it's in a different format. It's not as automated too. I want to get into paid growth a little bit because it's like, you know, you kind of talked about the strategies that got you to your first 10K. I want to talk about how you got to, you know, 50K, 100K. And now a lot of that's paid, of course, just naturally. That's how growth works. But before we do, referral programs. You kind of wrote like the go-to blog post on referral programs over five years ago, right? That's my first ever building in public moment, I think. Yeah. And like they've become kind of open people up to, oh, this is actually a thing. It works like introduce people to it. Now it's like more commonplace and more understood and maybe less effective. And I also think it's not necessarily less effective. It's just that you have to create really valuable content so people are willing to share it. And not everybody can do that or is able to do that yet. And then also not every newsletter is super shareable. Anyways, what's worked for you as far as referral programs, like what rewards, how do you promote it, et cetera? Yeah, so I have two rewards now. My whole newsletter is me building in public. And so you would assume that my typical reader is someone who is a startup founder, early startup employee, owns a small, medium sized business, but cares about building their company and probably skews more like the startup venture backed. side of the world. My whole thesis is being overly transparent and building in public without editing and holding back things. What I have as my first reward is by sharing a single and your link with just a single person, you receive the unedited series B deck that we use to raise $33 million. And it's like one of those things in Silicon Valley and just startups in general is a lot of founders are very protective and don't share their actual like. decks or how they raise capital because it talks about your long-term vision, your strategy, your competitors, and a bunch of other things. I think a lot of people like to keep close to the chest. And again, that's like my advantage is I am more than willing to be transparent and share that. And so I think that's a very unique reward as in like, again, going back to your point, it's one of one, like no one else can really offer that unless they download it and use mine. But for the most part, like it's authentic and it comes from me. And so like it's our series B deck that we raised 30 million plus from. And then the second reward is I set up a dropshipping site using Fourth Wall, which we integrate directly with. And they basically just do merch at scale. And obviously dropshipping is like, I don't have any actual inventory, but I've built different designs for different T-shirts and mugs and a few other things. If you share, I think it's three referrals, you get maybe 20 or 25% off anything in the store. And then for me as the operator, that's free because I've done the math. If you take 20% off anything in the store. i still like break even on that so it's cost me nothing you get discounted goods from this store and like the hope is the people who actually want to purchase that are fans of the big desk energy brand again not for everyone but if you've liked the content and like the building in public persona or just the name big desk energy i actually have great merch that i spent a weekend designing and you can get it for 20 off but i think the big takeaway from both of those is that neither of them cost me anything And so when you think back to the Morning Brew referral program that works so well, the cheat code for that referral program is like, yes, we had hats and mugs and T-shirts and sweatshirts, but the first like 10 referrals were totally free for us. I think at three referrals, we added you to an exclusive newsletter and the thinking was very straightforward, right? If you love Morning Brew and you're signing up to be up to date on current events and you read it Monday through Friday, you're also probably someone who would love an extra edition to get ahead on your week that you receive on Sunday. So that costs us zero outside of like, you know, the salary of the person who was already on salary anyway. So it costs zero for someone to join that list. At five, I think we sent stickers, which costs, I think at scale, maybe a few pennies to ship them out. And then at 10, it was access to this Facebook group for our exclusive insider group. And so to get the 10 referrals, it cost us, I think, when you average it out per referral, maybe like two cents, which was like the stickers and shipping. And so the key there is like, yeah, there's flashier T-shirts and mugs and hats, but you didn't act, we didn't actually have to like pay for that until you got to like 25, 50, 100 referrals. At that point, if someone's taking their time to refer 100 readers, to spend $15 on like a hat and T-shirt for them to bring in that much growth was 100% worth it. The through line to both of those is I don't pay anything for my referral program and Morning Brew barely paid anything for their first 10 to 15 referrals. I think a lot of people think referral program and they start thinking swag, which then makes you customer service to have to order swag and then ship swag and then deal when it doesn't show up in the mail to whoever you're sending it to. So I think that's kind of the cheat code. Oh, yeah, you're doing it perfectly in one like. A lot of times people will share to get one, but like they shared in Slack and they get three. That's the best way to do is like your best digital thing, which you did your deck for one referral. Like that's the best way to start. And you can always add more to it later. Maybe this is like a funny tangent because I used to work at the hustle, which we were like morning. We were competitors back then, kind of. And I managed the referral program there. I think we both had like, if you refer a thousand people, you like get flown out to the office. What was Morning Brew is a thousand things. Yeah. At a thousand referrals, we would buy you a flight to New York City. I think put you in a hotel. And we had a relationship with the New York Stock Exchange. And so you would actually get to go to the stock exchange with a few employees and then hang out in the office all day. Then we typically did like a happy hour of some sort. I think in total, we probably flew 10 people out over the course of like two years. That's cool. I think that was I think by the time I got to the hustle, they had changed that reward, but it must have only been a handful of people. But it is it kind of goes to the point that like you The one to 10 things, especially one to three are key. If I remember the data, like we only had like three or four people ever cross 500 or 100 referrals, but you're getting thousands of people to share it with one or two friends. That's kind of how the math worked out for the hustle and probably how it was for most people who did these referral programs. Yeah, I think if you can think of the power law of like if you could imagine your 10 biggest super fans, like how far would they go to do something and in this case referrals to win something else. like for you with the event that you run every year right like maybe 100 or 500 referrals get to like a free vip ticket to the event or something and it could just be their time we just launched digital products the other week and so i've just been experimenting with launching different products for the sake of getting familiar with how to do it on the platform and i launched like a coaching session which i just priced at a thousand dollars an hour just to see if anyone would be interested in like a startup coaching session it's been live for a week no bites yet but like it's one of those things that i think like would someone share 50 to 100 times for like an hour coaching session depending on who they are and like what their goals are maybe worth experimenting with that worked well for us the hustle we gave away some time with sam power and i've seen other newsletters do too that's that's cheap for coaching with you i think you're going to get a lot more of those soon i feel like you haven't promoted that much i don't want to make this whole podcast about paid ads and like these people like we've talked about that they can go to like facebook ad library look at your name look at your newsletter and see like your ads and see your strategy. But that sounds like that's been one of the key scaling strategies to get you from 10K to, was it 100K now? Yeah, about 120 today. Awesome. So is that accurate? give people context yeah i'd say all of the things like the gritty things that i have already mentioned were very early days and still continue to this day so i still try to post and promote before and after i still have a va going and dming everyone i still use the recommendation system i still use the referral program but the big two things were probably around paid paid being one bucket is paid acquisition from instagram facebook not really much google but mostly instagram and facebook I also haven't experimented a ton with X, but I have seen people have success with X. Curious to your thoughts. And then the other one is Boost, which is basically paid recommendations within the Beehive network. And so probably put in maybe 100K all time into Boost. Granted, that's amortized over the course of two years. So you're not going to do public math, but like, what, four to five thousand a month. So we have this network of. 50 000 active publishers within the beehive network boost allows me to set my own price so i think it's like a dollar fifty or two dollars per lead people apply to my newsletter saying that they want to promote it and then whenever these newsletters send me leads through their sign up form i pay them a dollar fifty or two boosts kind of get overlooked a lot especially for growth and i like boost for growth because with beehive you can identify like who do you want to boost you and you can reject people that aren't a good fit That's one thing that's different than a lot of platforms is like you can pick and choose who's going to recommend you. And a lot of that improves your quality drastically because like you know what type of newsletters have the audience that you want and who doesn't. Of course, you can set your price to your budget. You can also set location to like if you only want subscribers from U.S., can you only pay for U.S., I think. Yeah, exactly. And so like I guess in contrast to like paying for Instagram ads, like you have a target acquisition cost, call it two dollars, but it varies depending on the performance of the creative. uh competition seasonality like a bunch of other things that lead to whether or not you're actually paying two dollars i think the benefit of boost is you say that you want to pay two dollars and that's the maximum you will ever pay per qualified subscriber we put a ton and arguably too much time into this verification mechanism where It's almost like a money back guarantee where if the subscriber that someone sends you doesn't actually engage or open your newsletters, you have the setting where they either just stay on the list, but you don't pay for them or they drop off because they're a lower quality subscriber to keep the list clean. And so we put a lot of time into this verification system. And we also have like anti-spam and security mechanisms that are always identifying. Obviously, we're a global platform. There are plenty of places where people would love to get paid $2 per email submission. And so we have tons of alerts set up to be able to monitor and see when there is fraud in the system. to prevent that. So I think those are the pros of Boost and it works really well. Where I'd say the cons are is like we've almost over indexed on pretending that everyone is a growth manager. When we built this, I imagined myself back when I was leading growth at Morning Brew, where I'm like locked into the platform, whether it's like Meta or Google or like in this case, like a co-registration network. And like every day I'm spending time monitoring which publishers are sending me the highest quality leads. Truth is most newsletter operators don't have the time to do that or don't even think like that. And so I actually think we built way too sophisticated of a growth suite for Boost. And it's actually one of our big projects that we are launching hopefully in the next like two months, a much, much more simpler hands off, like we know what's going to work best. We will feed you the data that you need to know, but like we will automate a lot of this and try to optimize your spend accordingly rather than like building it for like a growth manager. And I think we'll see a lot of success with that new framing. Yeah, I think that helps. You do kind of have to like set a calendar reminder to look at it and optimize it maybe on a biweekly basis. I know a lot of us like marketing nerds like look at stuff every day, but you don't need to optimize boost that much. I like simplicity. Also, I do like having the ability to just pick and choose who you want to boost. And one thing that we've we've over indexed in quite a bit is there's a lot of transparency in the platform. And so let's say I have my offer for two dollars per lead and I get 100 applications of those applications. You can see their average open rate, average engagement, the location, whether they're US, Canada, UK, like where their subscribers are based, the type of content they're creating. You can see their most recent post. So there's a lot of transparency. Like if you're going to basically do this handshake deal to pay someone to drive you subscribers, I think you should be able to understand the quality, the types of content they're creating, who their audience is before engaging in that type of business transaction. So we do show a lot of transparent data there, which has helped a ton. You can do like auto. accept roles where as applications file in if it meets certain criteria you don't actually have to approve it so high open rate us-based that writes about xyz that being said like yeah it's a lot of managing and i think it depends on like do most of our writers and content creators want to be growth managers or would they like to grow faster and they're willing to put in a bit of money behind it but they don't actually want to do the management of all of the levers on like a day-to-day basis and so i think we we over index for the former and are now trying to serve the latter You spent a good amount growing big desk energy. How do you monetize and get that money back? And also, if you can share, like, are you thinking about do you want to have a profit margin every month where you like break even at first? And then how do you think about that as well? Yeah. So I'll start with the first question. I basically monetize in three different ways. One is just the flip side of boost. So I boost other newsletters in the ecosystem. I get paid. for $1.50 and $3 for everyone I'm sending. So Boost is a two-sided marketplace. I'd say overall, that probably is less than 5% of my revenue through the newsletter. I'm not as active as I should, but Boost is one way. The second one is paid advertisements and sponsors. So I've used the Beehive Ad Network before, and that ranges from a few dollars CPC to a few dollars CPM. I've done that to backfill inventory plenty of times, but I also sell direct. And so I have my own media kit. of which i use beehive surveys to collect information about who my audience is so i know the breakdown of like male to female i know average age i know interest i know profession so i have a lot of first party and zero party data on my subscribers that they've given me through the survey form which i collect when people sign up and then i have an automation to collect additional information when when you can set up a survey in beehive to be a post-subscribe survey and so every time someone signs up to my newsletter they're taken to a page to submit a survey where i ask about five questions which the entire purpose of that survey is so i can sell advertising because i have a better sense of who my audience is i've also set up an automation which is triggered when someone signs up and it basically checks three days later did they submit that survey because if they didn't that's valuable information that i did not collect from them so i actually send an automated email a few days later nudging them to submit their survey and that has actually like a crazy high completion rate i think of my 120 000 subs about 30 to 40 000 of them have submitted the survey raised the high percentage because of both the post subscribe survey and how i positioned it and the follow-up automated email yeah and i bet just to add it's probably a higher percent of people who sign up via a form like you have a lot of people who sign up via boost and they're not going to see that survey because they're signing up for another newsletter as well Surveys are really important. We could spend a lot of time on it, honestly. And with my BI survey, I'm getting like 87 to 90% completion rate after signup. Yeah, I'm happy if you, I don't know if you want to do like a lead magnet or include it in the show notes, but I'm happy to link out to my media kit, which I've created from the survey data. So I think that's important to get across the audience. It is, I need to sell advertising, which is my primary way of monetizing the newsletter. The first question every brand is going to ask is like, who's your audience? Like, who am I actually paying to get in front of? And while I have data on who's clicking and engaging and I can make a hypothesis, it's startup founders who are interested in whatever. If you just ask them and collect the correct data, it's so much easier to package who your audience is and sell that advertisement. It's a long-winded way of saying, I have collected this data, I have a media kit, and I go out and market and I sell advertising to brands, whether it's HubSpot or Vanta or Adio. And I'm just giving all my sponsors a shout out here. But yeah, those are most of the B2B type software platforms. And I think it's also important for newsletter operators to understand like, if they are going to monetize with sponsors, who's like the right sponsor where it makes sense for them to pay a large sum of money to get in front of that audience. And the reason why I bring that up is like HubSpot, for example, can start at $30,000 per year. And if I do have these 120,000 subscribers who are startup founders, HubSpot might pay me $5,000 to $7,000 per sponsorship. And they only need one person to sign up to like a HubSpot enterprise plan. And they have crazy ROAS. And so I think that's important in the sense that a lot of people think more consumer platforms like Spotify would never make sense to sponsor my newsletter for signing up for 12 to $14 monthly plan because it would need hundreds of people to convert. But HubSpot needs one. And so I think that is also important when you're positioning your newsletter and thinking about monetization to understand who your audience is and who are the brands that would ideally like to get in front of that audience. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that brands, not every brand, but a lot of. especially more professional B2B brands, they don't care too much about your total subscriber count. They want to see your total audience size engagement and then your data that shows them 35% of the audience is this, 10% is that. And if you collect that immediately afterwards, like you should for post signup survey for Beehive, it makes it very easy to do this. And this isn't just Tyler's best practice. Like if you look at all the most successful B2B media companies, they all use post signup surveys immediately after you submit your email because this data is so important. We won't go into like, you can also send email automations or email broadcasts based off of the server responses too. Yeah. The last thing I'd say in terms of monetization is like what, you know, you mentioned B2B. I'm not like a B2B publisher per se, but events are something that's like really interesting. And so I think when most people think of paid media, it is sponsorship and it is paid subscriptions. And I don't have a paid subscription for my newsletter. But people often overlook what I consider is like the more creative ways that you can extract revenue from your audience. And so because I am building in public as a startup founder and have attracted a lot of other startup founders to read the newsletter, I launched this mastermind. Basically, it's a founder mastermind that I host in Costa Rica. It's $10,000 per person. We host about seven to eight people. And by we, I mean me. I've done it like all myself. I've done four of them and the fifth one's coming up in a few weeks. But it's $70,000 in revenue. Obviously, there's costs. I rent like a big house. We get a boat. There's like a chef. So there's a lot of costs that add up. But it's one something I actually genuinely enjoy doing. I've met 25 to 30 incredible founders that I have, like this tight knit network that I've built on Slack. It's a great experience to learn and connect with other people. And then as far as like revenue, it's probably. 50 60 percent revenue profit margins on these events and so i think it's just like getting outside of the box and thinking what value can you provide these content creators i think what got me to think about that is there was like a surfer youtuber who was trying to figure out how to monetize i think everyone at the table at the time was talking about run more ads find a brand sponsor that you can promote in your videos and he ended up landing on doing a surf school once a year And it made far more money than paid ads would have ever made him. And so I think it's just like the thinking outside of the box and like the IRL component doesn't have to be IRL could be totally remote. But I think there's like a lot of opportunities to monetize audiences once you can capture their attention. Yeah, I love this. I wanted to talk about this. Like you kind of explained a lot of my questions because it's it's not that complicated what you do. And I'm surprised more like people do these types of masterminds in a similar format, but not a lot of people. I don't see this done a lot. And so like you promote it a lot. You build a waitlist for it. you sell it for 10k well what goes of the process like you promote it in your newsletter on social people can go and see your social or newsletter issues to kind of see examples of that you send people to like an application page right so i created a survey in bi that basically collects their name their social handles a bit about their business other things i kind of want to know if i'm going to spend five days with them because the funny part about it is like i don't i've never done phone screens or like interviews or anything it's really based off this form where i can kind of judge whether They are an impressive founder who I think could provide value to the group that I'd want to spend time with in Costa Rica for five days. And so just some qualifying questions around the size of their business and what they're trying to get out of the experience, what value they think they could provide and teach other founders in the group. And you'd be surprised how much information you can get from that in terms of like, this is a high value person that you want to be in this like eight person group. But yeah, I basically created a survey form on Beehive that's hosted on my website. I plug it in the newsletter probably two to three months prior to the event. I probably get between 15 to 40 applicants every time. I'll post it on social as well and then kind of just go through and narrow it down and organize it from there. I think everyone's always pretty surprised that I actually do the organizing. Like I book the house, I book the chef, I coordinate the shuttles to pick everyone up from the airport. I do a very specific thing and a lot of very specific things at Beehive. Anytime I get the opportunity to do and use different parts of my brain, whether it's like event planning and coordination or whatever, I'm happy to do it. And it's worked really well. And are you manually approving people, I'm assuming? And then you send them like an approval email to where they can purchase? Give them a cold email, make sure that they're on board, make sure they're okay with the pricing, make sure they're available for the dates, give them context to who else is like in this cohort. and then accept the wires, coordinate into like a slack group and kind of organize the trip from there. That's cool. And I think you reveal pricing up front, like before application. Yeah, I make it pretty clear. Yeah, which I like for this. You want to be surprised by that. It's like it's a mastermind of seven people or eight people. It's going to be expensive. And this is a good like event that it's not easy, but it's this is not a conference. One person can organize it. It's not rocket science. You have shuttles. Not everybody has to have shuttles. You can have a chef. You can have everything else. Cut out some complexity if you want to, but yeah. Yeah, I think I'll eventually do one of these soon. But what I think is interesting too is like, I think a lot of entrepreneurs and people immediately go to like, how much money can I make from this and how big can this thing be? And so I think the first few I hosted, some of the founders were like, you could easily get a conference and do 50 to 100 people, make this so much bigger multi-day event. The small eight-person group of like actually being able to sit around a dinner table and hang out with people for four straight days, go surfing with them, we get like a boat. We do a lot of these different strategy sessions. You basically leave with like a really great understanding of who all eight of these people are. And I much prefer that from like a personal and taste preference than some big conference, for me being the one hosting it, right? that's where i guess like my taste changes as a host it's it definitely is a lot more fun did you say you do two or three per year i forgot what you said uh it's slowing down as the business has grown it's it's harder and harder to carve out the time but i've done four historically and i have a fifth coming up this week and this is what it's been two years since i launched the newsletter so i'd say like every five months yeah and as you you know someone wanted to implement a strategy like this like as you promote these and build the wait list if you're wanting to do a bigger event later you now have this wait list of people who one or two, a time of your previous events. And also you have past customers who you can launch a bigger event to. That's kind of like the classic event strategy. And I think what is important is like the hustle and morning brew in this game kind of normalized this like hyperscale newsletter where you sell a sponsorship for $50,000 because you have 5 million readers. The power of niches, which you know very well, if you can get a ticket cost of $10,000 to an event or a whatever you're selling as the costs of these goods increase like you actually need a smaller subset of really engaged people to be willing to purchase these you have 120 000 readers i only need eight people to sign up for this to be able to have a 60 profit margin on these events and so i do think there's a lot of value in serving a very particular audience and doing it really well and if we start chatting about like my big goals for like beehive and what we're building like the way that i view newsletters is like the ultimate top of funnel and how can we as a platform build more functionality and more flexibility where you can engage your audience many layers deeper and be unopinionated that so whether it is digital products paid subscriptions live events courses community like what are the different ways that you can serve your audience and extract more revenue so you can continue to invest in your content and i think that's what really excites me yeah there's no one size fits all it's more about matching the right product to your audience versus everybody doing the same thing, everybody doing sponsorships or everybody even selling digital products. Events aren't good for everybody either, but they're great for some people. I don't know if we'll have time to cover this statement. Maybe we'll do something later where it's like we dive into like all the different business models and help people kind of match what's the best path for them and like how they do that with Beehive. Because I think that's what people are missing. They just don't understand the possibilities. They think sponsorship course, digital product, their mind isn't. They haven't seen enough examples outside of stuff like that, I feel. Yeah, and I think that's where we really differ from, I think, a lot of the competitors in this space. When you think of, like, the broader creator economy, Patreon's been around for a while. It was historically pledging to support artists and creators that you like and paid podcasts initially, and they were pretty opinionated about that. Substack launched and notoriously said that they would never have advertising on their platform and were very opinionated of, like, the proper way to monetize your content. in 2022 is paid subscriptions. And that's really what we want to support. But they actually like for a long time discouraged any sort of advertising going on in the newsletters. I think they've softened that quite a bit recently. And where I think those platforms have always been pretty opinionated. We've taken the complete opposite approach of I just want to build tools and infrastructure where our users can have success and whether it is digital products or paid subscriptions or advertising or co-registration like boost or community. or live events, like we really want to be the tools and infrastructure to say that every content creator and operator are very different from each other. And we don't benefit from one more than the other, but we benefit from all of them having the flexibility to launch what they want. And so I think that's where we've really shined recently. Yeah, I love that about Beehive is we do things that I don't think. beehive ever thought about when they first launched when you first launched it but like we do virtual events and webinars that we promote through beehive we do live events and conferences like new media summit i do courses and cohorts agency and like done some sponsorships too but um i think that's what people need is like there's no one size fits at all yeah i just can't imagine being on a platform where it's like you have like only way you can really make it work is if you have a ten dollar a month paid newsletter because everybody else has one too it's like that's just kind of crazy to me And I think people are seeing that, Jim. And I think as much as we value product velocity and ship tons of updated products and think we have a very expansive suite, we also are aware that we can't launch everything. And so we have APIs and web hooks where you can connect directly with Slack or Stripe or Discord or any other third party platform, which I think is in contrast to the two other platforms I just mentioned and a lot of others in the ecosystem. And so I think that just fits under the ethos of maximum flexibility towards whatever, like if you have a huge discord community, we built a native integration for you to be able to get your paid subscribers or people who hit a certain referral milestone to automatically sink into this discord community as like one of many examples. And so I think the power of the open internet and being able to plug in with any third party platform is what creators should look for in a platform if they have maximum flexibility. yeah let's um let's shift gears like as we wrap up soon talk about the the future of newsletters and media but also the future of beehives i want to get to that and then ask you if we have done like a couple rapid fire questions from our community is that cool yeah let's do it what's the future of beehive look like in let's say uh somewhere like not next year but like somewhere far enough in the future where you can still kind of see out and like what the vision looks like what the feature set looks like who you're serving how do you think about that yeah What's funny about that is like I actually like never really think three to five years out or even like a year I think is hard in the sense that I think everything changes very rapidly in this industry. I think one of our superpowers has been able to listen to customer demands and what they want and also understand the competitive landscape that's very dynamic and be very quick to market things that we think can help our users. So like I actually typically at most plan out about six months. And so I do like a half year at a time. And I think how I view at least like 2026 playing out is very similar to what I've been alluding to, I think in my past answer or two, in the sense that how can we go deeper where the newsletter was the initial point of top of funnel. You can reach people directly. You own the audience. You own the distribution. You have a list of 100,000 people. When you hit send, it reaches 100,000 people. And you've created this behavior and this habit where your audience looks for your content. You can monetize that with paid subscriptions, with boosts, with ads and events, which is off platform now. But what are the multiple layers deeper beyond just newsletter that you can grow your audience, engage your audience and monetize your audience? We've been chatting a lot about events, podcasts come to mind, digital products we launched a week or two ago. And so you can sell e-books, courses, templates. Like I mentioned earlier, you can book time with me directly. So just. additional ways to monetize your audience. There's different mediums. You've hinted that you think 2026 is the year of SMS. I'm curious to get your take if you still believe that. But you can think of other mediums that fit the ethos of owning your audience and owning your distribution that we want to enable our users to experiment and expand on. And so without giving away our entire roadmap, I think that you can imagine a world where we become even less opinionated on how our content creators generate revenue and grow. integrate with more third-party platforms and go deeper in both mediums and functionalities that all tie up to providing more value to your users and i think that will become feels a little vague because i don't want to give away the exact roadmap but i think within six months it'll become very clear that what you can do in beehive is totally distinct from what you can do in any other platform and us not taking a cut of revenue and being very creator friendly i think positions us for the place for people to create content online and have owned audiences i like the vision and i know there's only so much you can share but that gives people the right direction i'm sure people will be curious about the different mediums you've already done a lot of podcast integrations i think you're doing more of that obviously email is going to be number one sms we were chatting about it via email or something it's just a tough one and you've seen all this stuff too it's like it's expensive and i was talking about matt paulson under a market beat about it has anybody done sms like not for marketing have you sent you know reminders about your newsletter or links to youtube videos or something like that and he's like it's probably too expensive to not do it for marketing you really have to have every sms lead to ten lead to revenue whether it's immediately or within you know a couple of weeks or months so i think it's a great channel as a supplement to email it can never be standalone without email it's not without its challenges and differences yeah i think we're still open to exploring it we haven't committed to anything yet but I think we are, again, unopinionated on what we build. We are more opinionated on like the ethos and philosophy of helping our users succeed. However, we think we can help them succeed. And so as you, Matt and others kind of discuss and explore SMS, I think it's an interesting channel for us to look into without over committing to it. Always integrations are always great too. And I think a lot of what my kind of tiny prediction for the future will be is They'll be more integrated in data sharing across both. So it's like maybe you refer one friend through Beehive and that triggers an SMS message or you open an email and Beehive tracks that and that triggers an SMS message just because it shows you're like engaging with our content. Now it's a good time to send you something else via text. And I think a platform that either integrates or does it all in one where you have those like automated integrations and data sharing across SMS and email is really interesting. Not many people are doing that. People do, but it's not super common. And so that's kind of just it. a thing i'm excited about to explore in the future just in general yeah maybe a curveball because i don't know if we're actually doing sms but it consider it being considered yeah and really just talking about like general marketing stuff that i think more people would do let's actually do the rapid fire questions now okay the first one is from stephanie like how do you think about the impact of ai she asked in in gmail especially with gemini and gmail but just in ai in the inbox in general and how is beehive preparing for this or thinking about helping publishers address it or work through it in the future? Yeah, so I think there are things we can't control, which is inboxes and Gmail changing, whether it's filtering or algorithms or how they leverage AI to extract info from the inbox. Admittedly, like we are fairly reactive to the market and the large tech players in terms of what they are doing there. And so we're always kind of like heads down, focusing on what the latest trends are, what they're launching and how we can alter our offering to help our users. more broadly on like AI, a few things. One, like obviously an incredible tool. I think the way that we view AI is not, hey, write me a full newsletter post to send to this audience and everything's done for you. I think when you think about anyone who's had an editor before knows that the content that is created after you've had an editor look over your work is always 10 times better than without having an editor. But having an editor is expensive and very few people have access to that. And so is there a world where AI is actually the perfect use case for having this always on editor that's trained on all of your content that knows what's performed well and who your audience is to help create better content? And then I also think there's a lot of parts of operating a business and a newsletter that is less sexy and less fun. Like the boost conversation we were having is one of like having to constantly go up, update and keep track of which publishers are performing well and sending you high quality subscribers. Same with like. cleaning your list, reengaging different subscribers, identifying opportunities to extract more revenue from different cohorts. And so is there a lot of like data and manual work that can be replaced and augmented with like a smart AI agent that understands your goals and can do a lot of that dirty work for you and present? the data that you need to see to have a better outcome and so i think we're constantly evaluating ways that we can layer in ai into the platform to make it a better experience for the user i think one thing a lot of people are curious about is or worried about is like ai summaries in the inbox like gemini has a summary you like click to summarize and it gives you two or three bullets do you worry about that should people be worried about that any general thoughts on that i think Some people should be worried about that. I think it depends on the type of content that you're creating. For example, like I'll use Morning Brew as an example. Like I enjoy the act of reading Morning Brew because I enjoy the writing. I enjoy the breadth of like the stories that they have like six or seven different stories. They have different commentary for news events and other things going on in the world. And so I think a big reason for Morning Brew success outside of like the growth and everything is obviously the content is very engaging and people look forward to reading it. is there a subset of consumers who just want the five headlines to know what's going on in the world and no commentary i think there's definitely plenty of people who optimize for like these recaps and this aggregated content feed kind of like an rss and that's kind of like what these summaries do but even going back to your point around like my newsletter being like a one-of-one content like these are anecdotes and tactics and stories that are 1500 words of like what i'm doing behind the scenes to build the company And so it can't really be replicated because no one else is in my seat to be able to do these. And I don't think a three sentence summary could actually do it justice of like the different stories and tactics that I'm sharing. So yeah, I think we'll probably see some sort of diversion from these aggregator newsletters who have the five biggest things that happened in crypto yesterday and just headlines like those probably provide less value in the world of AI. But those that actually have great writing and commentary and value to go a bit deeper, I think there's always going to be a place for that type of premium content. Yeah, that's a really good thought. I think good curation definitely isn't going away because there's just some people are just amazing at curation. But I think these affect marketing emails really negatively. Like I can just click and say, OK, Sephora 30% off expires on Friday. It's like I don't need to read the marketing email because I just got the summary. Right. Or just someone. you don't like talking to via email, you just get the summary. Yeah, I would actually say advantage newsletters for like the quality newsletters. Like Ben Thompson's Stratechery is incredible. Like I read every one of those and it's because I value his opinion and his expertise. And like there's not an, like the AI summary is meta beat earnings by 5%. And like that's actually not why I'm reading Ben Thompson's newsletter. And so I think it just forces content creators to lean into what they're best at and how they can differentiate. Do you think the newsletter marketer space is going to get saturated? at some point i'll say no i think everyone has been predicting that email has been saturated and it's the end of email or peak email since we first raised our seed round in 2021 and we've been proving that incorrect and so i think again i don't think it's overly saturated i think the job will continue to change and the higher quality email marketers and newsletter providers will figure out ways to stand out but yeah i don't think we're at a saturation point Absolutely. Sean had a question about success leaving clues like you get a lot of data through the users of Beehive and there are some people that kind of launch. Maybe they get to a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand subscribers and then cap off or quit. And then some companies grow super quickly and monetize super fast. Are there any types of key traits or patterns you see between the successful publishers and creators on your platform versus the ones that they don't? yeah two ones like obviously like very obvious which is like the persistence and kind of like the mr beast of like how many people actually create a hundred straight videos and try to get better each day and like it is a bit of a grind going from zero to one and i think the people that actually enjoy what they're doing enjoy creating content and want to get better have the persistence to push through and get over the hump of like that zero to one stage I'd say the other factor we've also alluded to earlier in the conversation is if you can find a business model that starts paying you for a smaller audience up front, it kind of pulls forward the reward. And so back in the Morning Brew days, we used people used to ask me, how big does my newsletter have to be before I can start monetizing? I kind of made up the number 10,000 is like when a brand would like maybe look at you depending on the size of the brand. But below that, most brands aren't allocating resources or money to pay for like a 2,000-person newsletter. The caveat is with the tools of Beehive, whether it's digital products or paid subscriptions, or you just have a great audience that advertisers want to get in front of, I actually think if you can figure out ways to reward yourself sooner. by having a very engaged, smaller audience. Obviously, the rewards are reinforcing to keep going. Absolutely. You made like a chat bot. Maybe it was a Delphi. Maybe it was another tool. We don't need to say the name of the tool where it goes train on your content. Was that worth doing as far as like was an ROI on your time or how much it cost to help you, you know, grow Beehive or your newsletter at all? yeah so it was delphi shout out delphi i'm a small very small investor so i gotta give him a shout out i'm always down to experiment with things i think i get a lot of replies that i can't always get around to and so like launching what i call dank bot which is really just trained on my content it was more of like an experiment of would it provide value and would people use it admittedly it has fallen off in terms of like my priorities to keep up to date with how many people are using it and like i'm probably not maximizing it to the most of my ability but that's more like a me bandwidth thing but i do like the thesis of large and i wouldn't consider myself like a large content creator but like larger content creators who have limited bandwidth is there a way to augment the relationship with your audience by offering some sort of like highly trained high quality ai chatbot I think we'll see more of that in the coming years. Awesome. Okay, one final question from the community. Sarah asked, actually, what are the major differences between Beehive and a platform like Kit if someone's considering switching? Whoever you see as competitors or alternatives. Yeah, I mean, they're all, the interesting thing about what we're building is we compete with a lot of different players. I think Kit in particular, I mean, they've been around for 12, 13 years and a big believer in betting on the trajectory of the platform. And so I think in terms of like functionality, we offer everything that they offer and then some. We have the Beehive Ad Network, which we didn't talk a ton about, but we have advertisers like Nike, Netflix, Roku, who sponsor newsletters on the platform. And so that firmly puts us in the camp of, again, unopinionated but trying to do whatever we can to make our users and creators successful and bringing in more revenue month over month and so whether it is digital products whether it's us we have a full website builder as well so you don't need wordpress or wix or squarespace but you can build a full web presence on beehive we obviously have all of the automations we have open apis we have native integrations i'd say Surface level platforms, both of them are fairly similar. I think we've been around for four years and I think we've shown the trajectory of our willingness to go the extra mile and build whatever we can to help augment the success of our users. And I think they're a different stage company who moves much slower and maybe has different priorities for what they're trying to accomplish. I think you can kind of see that trickle down in how we engage with users and our ambition to grow. and serve our users the best that we can. I don't want to make the whole podcast about this because I hope everybody succeeds. I'm a huge BeHive fan. Like the BeHive is the tool that I built my business on right now. Do you think that like the feature set, the feature parity is somewhat similar between BeHive and Ket? If that's not accurate, let me know. I have no idea because I don't track the features. Yeah, directionally correct, I'd say. But like you're saying, like trajectory BeHive is on is so much faster. And I think everybody would agree with that is like the. the pace at which you're shipping and also improving existing features is crazy. And people should consider where their platform is going to be a year or two and more from now. Like that seems to be, I think if you're going to, yeah, if you're going to build your business and choose like what horse to back in terms of like they have your data, they are launching things that help you succeed. I think I'd want to choose the one that has higher upside and greater trajectory. We recently, I won't name names. turned off our old partner program platform for a new one. And there's a landscape of a handful of them that have been around for a decade and moved very slow and have been restrictive for us in a lot of areas. And then there's a few upstarts where if you just look at the trajectory, they're shipping a few dozen features every single week. Their founder is in a Slack channel with us working through integrations. And I think that in this new AI world where features and functionality eventually start to get a bit more commoditized. It's a lot of like those in between X factors of the hustle of the team, the willingness of the co-founders and founder to go and like roll up their sleeves and do the dirty work. And like, where are they spending time? And I'm spending all my time online engaging with users and understanding how we can serve them better. And so I think there's something around like these X factors to consider. People don't really think about that. Like if you're building an audience on Instagram or YouTube, like you also need to bet on. where to spend your time there it's no different when you're building your business on a technology platform like beehive um that's a good point but yeah any my final thought really is like what i tell the team is i think our big competitive advantage is we give a more than anyone else and i think you can see that everything from our sellers will take calls on weekends i'm available 24 7 i give my email to everyone and so i do think there's like a hustle factor that i've seen really differentiate companies who are exceptional and companies that are okay and we're there first and i think we are firmly in the former camp and continuing and our goal is to be very exceptional i think that's like what i would say to anyone debating us between other platforms yeah that's not that's not bs i've seen that you have like the technologist and the team to those building incredible things but you're also the final thing i mentioned is like you have a lot of media creator people at your company like you have the morning brew background dan the coo is had a ton of background with like puck the information the telegraph airmail a bunch of great media companies and working in technology too um for big platforms like i think meta and doordash but he's super smart background you nailed it yeah yeah and he's gonna be at our event so i got to talk to him a couple of times like damn this guy's impressive and he was i think he really chased you because he was like an early investor and then came on board over the past couple years so I've been, what I'm trying to say is I've been impressed by your team, not just you. You're very impressive, but the team has been really fun. I can't do it by myself. So I'm glad that we have a very impressive team. Yeah. Okay. I think we'll put links to your beehive down below, your newsletter down below. If we have some type of, you know, resource that people can, can check out from like Tyler to learn from what he's doing. I'll put that down below too, but Tyler, thanks for doing this. This is really fun. I think we got to get into a lot of stuff that people haven't really heard from you before. So it was fun. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. This was great.

🐝 Join beehiiv here and use code GROWLETTER for 20% off:
https://www.beehiiv.com/

I sit down with Tyler Denk to break down how he built Big Desk Energy into a 120k+ subscriber newsletter—while still working a full-time job as Beehiiv's CEO. They get tactical on weekly workflow, “night-before / day-after” social promos, email-gated posts, referral rewards that cost $0, and how paid growth (Meta + Beehiiv Boosts) helps scale past 50k. Tyler also shares how he monetizes with sponsors, Boost revenue, and a high-ticket Costa Rica mastermind—and why founder-led marketing and trust matter more than ever in the AI era. If you’re building a newsletter as a side hustle (or scaling one fast), this episode is packed with actionable playbooks you can copy.

Tyler's newsletter Big Desk Energy: https://www.bigdeskenergy.com/

Tyler's media kit here: https://docsend.com/view/d6uy7rq8w87k2qkf

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:59 Building a 120K Subscriber Newsletter on the Side
02:01 Managing Time While Working Full-Time
07:45 Launch Strategy & Early Growth Tactics
14:49 Leveraging Social & DMs for Growth
17:38 Scaling with Paid Ads & Beehiiv Boost
21:17 Referral Programs That Actually Work
29:01 How Tyler Monetizes (Sponsors, Boost, Ads)
34:36 $10K Mastermind Strategy
41:57 The Future of Beehiiv
48:21 AI & The Future of Email
55:49 Beehiiv vs. Other Platforms

Bonus Resources:
🎤 Pre-order recordings from our conference with speakers like Codie Sanchez, Ryan Deiss, and 15+ more (https://recording.newmediasummit.com/)