Good afternoon everyone. I hope you’re ll having a nice day. Did you see Balthazar’s sugary gingerbread village yet? Are there any other massive gingerbread houses on display like that in New York? I’d like to visit them this weekend.
Today’s newsletter includes a timely interview with Tyler Denk, CEO of beehiiv, plus why I’m back on team Unwell and a restaurant worth traveling to Orlando for.
I finished this on the subway to therapy, apologies for any typos :)
Guest Lecture: Tyler Denk
This interview is part of a Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. In this series, I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want.
Tyler Denk is the CEO of beehiiv, a newsletter publishing platform, like Substack. Prior to co-founding the company, Tyler was the second employee at Morning Brew in a role that spanned engineering, product, and growth. In this interview he talks about his predictions about the newsletter industry, making money on beehiiv, and his fundraising process.
“How have you seen smaller newsletters on beehiv successfully grow distribution, outside of paid acq? It seems like Substack is working well as a discovery platform, which feels worth the trade off of building in a partially-walled garden for many creators” - Joe
Short answer: yes, thousands. It’s actually what I’m most proud of — there have been countless success stories of writers and hobbyists building substantial newsletters on beehiiv with little-to-no prior experience. I met Ben Teller in LA a few years ago, he never sent a single newsletter previously, became an early adopter of beehiiv and by leveraging our tools he went on to sell The Blueprint in a wildly successful acquisition. Ditto here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Substack, a social app, for sure has better native distribution via the Notes app. But I wouldn’t conflate followers with engaged readers, and we’ve seen countless examples of this being the case. It all depends on what you’re prioritizing — vanity metrics and passerby traffic, or a sustainable audience.
“How did the Morning Brew acquisition factor into your decision to start your own company? Was it something you always wanted to do? Did cashing out on MB equity enable the move?” - Seth
The impetus for beehiiv began during my Morning Brew days. I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I led product, engineering, and growth as a 24 year old (a dream role). I built the referral program (responsible for 1M+ readers), I built the CMS the writers used to create the newsletter, I built the website and newsletter itself, along with the ad tech and audience development tools. And every morning thousands of readers would reply back to the newsletter asking how we built the templates, the referral program, etc. Translation: there was clear demand for what we had built, and fortunately I happened to be the one who built a lot of it.
I felt as if I left the Morning Brew experience in the top 1% of those who truly understood what it took to build a successful newsletter. And the acquisition money was a decent cushion at 26 years old to give me the confidence to take a chance at it.
“Did you expect the newsletter media business (Puck, TFP, all of the creators now launching newsletters for their podcasts) to grow the way it did this year? What did you believe was true in January that you no longer believe is true today?” - Emily
Yeah I did, and I think we’re still so early. Email isn’t going anywhere — nearly every adult professional opens up their laptop and runs through their emails several times a day. The quality of newsletters (and the effort these outlets and creators are putting into their email strategy) is only going to continue to get better… and the tools and platforms that help facilitate audience growth (like beehiiv) will only continue to innovate and get better with time.
At Morning Brew we had to play on hard mode. There was no platform built for newsletters, there was no playbook, there were no real email-specific audience tools. We had to build all of that ourselves and fail many times over before we cracked the code.
My job is to build better tech and make the impossible possible for more people to pursue their passion.
“How are brands thinking about partnering with newsletter publishers on sponsored posts / sponsored content? What can writers do to facilitate brand partnerships?” - Daniel
When I ran growth at Morning Brew I would spend over $500K per month across every channel you could imagine: Facebook, Snap, Google, Pinterest… and newsletters. While Facebook and Google are the most scalable in today’s advertising landscape — newsletters always performed best for us… and other advertisers are learning that too.
The beehiiv Ad Network is home to advertisers like Netflix, Nike, Roku, HubSpot, BetterHelp and hundreds of other top-tier brands. They are seeing remarkable results because these newsletter audiences are highly niche and engaged, the inbox is far less contested than social feeds (i.e. they perform better) and a lot of this inventory was never available before.
tl;dr brands are seeing a ton of success and publishers are getting paid a ton for maintaining quality email lists.
“At the beginning, how did you get investors and writers to buy-in to the need for beehiiv in a space with such a high-awareness incumbent (i.e. Substack)?” - Teddy
I’d probably attribute it to two things: narrative and the size of the market.
Re narrative — “3 early Morning Brew employees are building a newsletter platform to democratize the same tech and capabilities for anyone to take advantage of” is a fairly compelling one given the notoriety of their success. At the time, everyone wanted to be the Morning Brew of X — and we knew how to make that possible.
Re size of market — Substack isn’t that big. It was rumored they made somewhere in the $20M range last year. Mailchimp was acquired for $12B in 2021. Active Campaign, Campaign Monitor, SailThru, AWeber, MailerLite, Cordial, Braze, Customer.io, Constant Contact, Drip… another several billion dollars of market value there. This market is deep, and a lot of the participants are fairly antiquated and ripe for disruption.
Very intrigued by your marketing campaigns and posts directly talking about other platforms and competition in the space, since it's something most founders and CEOs are reluctant to do (and have sometimes gotten backlash for). What's made you take this approach, vs a "rising tide lifts all boats" approach? - Brandy
I don’t really buy into the “unwritten rules” of what a CEO is or isn’t supposed to do. My job is to build the absolute best product in the market, maximize the amount of people in the world who know about it and use it, and hire the most ambitious people to support us in doing both of the above.
When I have an opinion on a topic, like how Substack’s incentives are entirely misaligned with their writers and leverage a myriad of dark patterns to exploit their readers, I feel like I should use my platform to share for the commonwealth of the ecosystem.
More importantly, it’s working. No one’s going to pay attention to what you’re doing if you never have anything interesting to share. That hasn’t been the case with beehiiv and our trajectory. We’re punching way above our weight in earned media and relevance. Case and point: Inc. December cover story.
“When I have an opinion on a topic, like how Substack’s incentives are entirely misaligned with their writers and leverage a myriad of dark patterns to exploit their readers, I feel like I should use my platform to share for the commonwealth of the ecosystem.”