beehiiv Review: Success Story of the Best Newsletter Tool of 2023

The creator-driven world has shifted dramatically.

Traditional social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have begun lagging – due to ad earnings dropping, seemingly random account bans, and lack of transparency.

The result? Instead of giving up on publishing content, creators have decided to take their audience into their own hands.

Newsletters and email marketing have been around for quite some time (30+ years). But, newsletters are becoming more popular as people recognize the value of personalized content and non-algorithmic advertising.

Until recently, it was challenging to start a newsletter. Writers had to follow a standard HTML template which had almost zero flexibility in writing. They had to set up custom Mailchimp integrations and more. All in all, it was an uphill battle.

Newsletter platforms like Substack and social-led publications like Medium offered creators a path to build their audience and create recurring revenue streams. But, as the creator economy has skyrocketed over the past few years, the platforms have struggled to keep up with the demand for creator-driven tools.

Now, there’s a new player in the game: beehiiv. In just two years, the platform has grown to $3 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) and has received several rounds of funding including a recent $12.5 million Series A funding in June 2023.

In this article, we’ll delve deep into the story of how beehiiv rose to the pinnacle of the newsletter industry in just two years. You’ll learn the 3 growth drivers that made beehiiv so successful early on, with some key insights on how you can leverage it as a founder or creator to grow both your audience and your income.

Let’s dive in.

What Is beehiiv?

While the newsletter world began shifting when Substack came on the scene a few years ago, the entire creator industry has taken a double take on the latest startup, beehiiv. The platform offers a cheaper, user-friendly, and highly efficient platform with all the features a writer would need to start a newsletter.

Founded in 2021 by CEO and co-founder, Tyler Denk, beehiiv is one of the fastest-growing newsletter platforms in the world. In just two years, the platform is already doing $3 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and has 30% month-over-month (MoM) growth since it launched.

beehiiv is a hosted newsletter platform built for creators and business owners. While the platform can be used by hobbyists, it’s primarily targeted at people looking to grow and monetize an online audience.

How beehiiv works?

While beehiiv is primarily a newsletter platform, it technically works as a hybrid between a newsletter and a blog – all in one place.

The platform offers dual functionality. It’s a place where you can both create and send newsletters, while simultaneously publishing those newsletters in blog format on your own beehiiv-hosted website – done on a single tool.

With beehiiv, you can start a newsletter (and a website), grow your audience, create newsletters, hit send, and track the results. And, for those looking to earn an income, beehiiv also offers a variety of monetization tools you can take advantage of to create new revenue streams.

beehiiv is an out-of-the-box toolset for building strong user-friendly newsletters. Their pitch on their landing page reads the following and we certainly believe so.

beehiiv provides the best (and widest variety) of features that anyone running a newsletter can think of. Anyone can set up a beehiiv newsletter in just 2 minutes. The best part is, it provides all the functionalities you need right out of the box.

Here’s a tweet by the CEO/Co-founder Tyler Denk explaining the top 15 features of beehiiv. Mind you, there have been a ton of new features released since then (this is an old tweet from December 2022).

With beehiiv, you can create a self-sufficient business as a creator. Whether you’re looking to take your existing business and ramp up the revenue through email marketing, or you’re wanting to create a new path where you can earn a living as a digital content creator.

beehiiv & Tyler Denk’s Backstory

Initially marketed as “the most creator-friendly newsletter platform”, beehiiv was co-founded by a few early team members from the popular business newsletter, Morning Brew. Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett, and Jake Hurd, officially launched beehiiv in November 2021 after spending a few years building Morning Brew to millions of subscribers.

Tyler Denk’s College Startup

To back it up a little, beehiiv’s backstory really begins with co-founder Tyler Denk in his college days. Back in his junior year at the University of Maryland, he founded a company called VentureStorm that connected entrepreneurs, startups, and software developers. Over the course of a few years, he and his co-founders grew VentureStorm to over 10,000 users.

Despite this initial venture not achieving the monetary success he was aiming for, it provided him with the opportunity to grow as an entrepreneur, gaining valuable startup skills like programming (he doesn’t have a coding background — he was a mechanical engineering student), diving into growth marketing, and developing a strong work ethic.

Growing Morning Brew to Millions of Subscribers

In 2017, the cofounder of Morning Brew, Austin Rief, hired Tyler Denk as the second employee. While there, Tyler wore multiple startup hats spanning product, engineering, and growth. In a short period of time, he was able to develop a variety of high-impact tech, including the website, content management system, referral program, and ad management platform.

As the head of growth, Tyler was able to grow the Morning Brew newsletter from 40,000 subscribers to 2.5 million in just four years. Soon after he left to start his own thing (beehiiv), Business Insider acquired Morning Brew for $75 million.

While at Morning Brew, Tyler focused on a few key areas which led to its rapid success:

• An integrated referral program to drive cheap and organic growth

• SEO-optimized site to capitalize on search engine traffic

• Social-sharing functionality so every newsletter could be easily shared

• Analytics dashboards to assess and double-down on successful acquisition channels

• A custom content management system optimized for a newsletter

• Custom ad management platform to manage dozens of ad placement

In just a few years, Tyler was able to craft a self-sufficient system to create and grow a newsletter. MorningBrew and Tyler’s "fail fast" mentality enabled him to iterate and optimize the company's strategies quickly. With his experience at Morning Brew, he gained a front-row seat at launching, growing, and scaling a newsletter from nothing to an eventual 8-figure exit.

YouTube: Learning World-Class Product Management

Right after leaving Morning Brew, Tyler was hired by YouTube Music as their Product Lead. While he already had the idea for beehiiv brewing in his head, he wanted to gain some experience at a larger tech company to learn about product management from the best in the world.

While Tyler learned to innovate, experiment, and iterate quickly at Morning Brew, he learned about structured management and the methodological approach to product management. With the use of Product Required Documents (PRDs) and Technical Scoping Documents, Tyler was able to align teams, communicate ideas effectively, and optimize resource allocation.

Taking Flight With beehiiv

While growing Morning Brew, Tyler noticed that other newsletter businesses weren’t experiencing the same level of growth with their publications. As he brushed shoulders with other creators, they kept asking how they were growing so quickly and how their system worked.

Tyler saw their struggles to piece together clunky WordPress sites and try to run silo-style referral programs with limited and scattered data points on their audience. At that time, there really wasn’t anything like beehiiv. So, Tyler decided to take a leap of faith by creating his own all-in-one platform.

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Just around the time he left Morning Brew, Tyler decided to build an out-of-the-box newsletter platform (in August 2020). Tyler mentioned in one of the podcasts that he likes to give names to the things he’s working on. So he was iterating something based on beehive, but because the domain was unavailable, he named it “beehiiv”. He says he made the decision to go with beehiiv in less than five minutes, realizing that when you have the right product, the name becomes unimportant.

After a year of building, beehiiv was officially launched in November 2021.

And, in just a mere span of 2 years, Tyler and the team have built an amazing newsletter product. During this time, they have raised two seed rounds totaling $4.2 million, and they recently announced a series A round of $12.5 million.

The journey has been fascinating, with almost 0% customer acquisition cost, which is a very difficult thing to achieve while building a B2C business, and even more challenging for a startup (let alone one that’s achieved 30% MoM growth).

Why we started GrowthDeck on beehiiv

We (Meet Shukla and Keval Jagani) have spent a considerable amount of time investigating and studying different startups. We decided that we didn't want all of our research efforts to go to waste, so we launched the GrowthDeck newsletter.

Now the dilemma was where to begin, we were exploring different newsletter platforms. We first went on to ConvertKit, which is a good tool, but the majority of its features like automation, digital downloads, etc were not of much use to us at this point. Additionally, we found Convertkit to be a bit less user-friendly. At this point, we needed a newsletter platform that had built-in analytics, newsletters, and a blog platform.

We then signed up for beehiiv and after using it for a while now, we have decided we'd never look back. It is an excellent platform! We wanted our research to be visible as blogs, which is one of the most crucial things for us, and Beehiiv offers it for free right out of the box. We continue growing and intend to stay with beehiiv as long as we do newsletters

beehiiv’s Growth Drivers

Now, let's take a closer look at the growth drivers that led to beehiiv’s rapid success.

Growth Driver 1: Product Led Growth

Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy in which user acquisition, retention, and expansion are primarily driven by the product itself. This is achieved by focusing on the features that would attract the most customers, putting customers upfront, and using their feedback to quickly iterate through the product, which, in turn, helps build an amazing product.

Here are the top 3 things that helped beehiiv in achieving product-led growth:

1. Prioritizing Features for Customers

From the beginning, beehiiv focused on developing features that have the greatest impact on their users based on their extensive experience in the newsletter industry. They strive to strike a balance between providing necessary features, incorporating unique functionalities, and eye-catching elements that attract new users.

One area where beehiiv has excelled above the competition is their analytics. Plenty of newsletter platforms offer the ability to send emails, collect data, and even offer automations. But, few offer dashboards and analytics that newsletters publishers need in order to grow quickly and optimize their strategy.

That’s where beehiiv is different. The intuitive platform features a 3D Analytics Dashboard to help you dive deep into data points to help you understand how different segments of your audience engage with your newsletter content.

With beehiiv’s 3D analytics, you can:

• See exactly where readers came from (i.e. referral program)

• See engagement for specific campaigns (i.e. Instagram ad campaign)

• Create segments based on people who subscribed during a specific time frame

beehiiv’s analytics are just one of many features they offer. There are dozens of other unique tools available to help creators build, grow, and monetize their email list like beehiiv Recommendations, Boosts, Ad Network, and of course, the native referral program (which is based on the same one that helped grow Morning Brew to millions of subscribers).

2. Customer First Attitude

Another aspect of their success with product-led growth is that beehiiv has been built in public. Even more importantly, Tyler and the team have iterated very quickly from the beginning while being very customer-centric – and replying to customers quickly and taking their feedback seriously.

beehiiv’s customer-centric nature was depicted when Tyler was late to one of the podcasts because he was going through customer tickets. This has been the scenario for Tyler for a long time.

Tyler’s mentality of “If it’s perfect, it’s already late” made them push features fast. However, being customer-centric and proactive on Twitter has helped them fix bugs quickly to ensure their product is continuously being optimized. Here’s an example of instances where Tyler has responded to customers via Twitter to fix issues in real-time:

3. Customer Acquisition on Steroids

In just two years' time, beehiiv has already acquired over 7,500 active newsletter publishers on its platform. There’s no doubt that beehiiv is one of the fastest-growing newsletter platforms in 2023.

The crazy part? Tyler admitted that they didn’t even spend a single dollar on acquisition for the first 12 months. Even to this day, close to 90% of beehiiv’s growth has come through unpaid tactics.

Every day, beehiiv users send upwards of 100,000 newsletters per day in total. Every newsletter that’s sent out has a “Powered by beehiiv” message on the bottom, creating a powerful viral loop. It’s reminiscent of the early Hotmail days when they included a “Sent from my Hotmail account” message with every email, which spread the word about the email provider.

It didn’t take long for beehiiv’s growth to reach beyond the early adopters and into the mainstream. Some of the top newsletters on beehiiv include The Boston Globe, The Milk Road, and Matthew Berry’s Fantasy Life.

From the start, Tyler heavily used Twitter to acquire new customers by gaining their attention with impressive offers to switch over. Plus, on many occasions, he seemed to be in the right place at the right time to respond to people's complaints and concerns with their current providers. Here are a couple of the amazing customer interactions.

When other founders were zigging, Tyler was zagging. For instance, Tyler says, “Do things that don’t scale, especially early on.” They sent out unconventional cold emails like:

One of the biggest things beehiiv did while pitching newsletter publishers to switch over was a quick and easy one-click import feature, which helped them bring a lot of users over from Substack and MailChimp.

Growth Driver 2: Creator-Friendly Earning Opportunities

beehiiv was certainly not the first platform that simplified writing newsletters. Before beehiiv, there were players in the market like Substack, Medium (not directly focused on newsletters), Convertkit, and Ghost. However, as the creator economy grew, and demand increased for platforms that made it easy to earn a living as a creator, it was clear that there were some significant problems with these products.

beehiiv vs Medium

Medium is a platform that connects publishers and readers. The platform allows readers to view 5 free articles. After that, they need to pay a subscription fee of $5 per month. The earnings from the readers are split between Medium and writer based on multiple criteria like:

1. Time spent actively reading an article

2. Average monthly reading time spent on your article

3. How many referred members signed up through your article

Medium has a large and diverse reader base, and it effectively connects readers with appropriate writers.

However, there are several significant limitations to the platform. Firstly, writers are not allowed to include affiliate links, display ads, or incorporate calls to action for their users. This makes it incredibly difficult to establish a full-time income from your effort on the platform.

Additionally, there’s no direct means for readers to establish connections with writers, which means you’re extremely limited in your ability to convert your readers into your own audience. Plus, Medium's algorithm determines which content is presented to readers. Furthermore, Medium lacks support for custom domains and imposes strict moderation policies, among other issues.

beehiiv vs Substack

Substack is similar to beehiiv in many ways and helped revive the newsletter game a few years ago. However, Substack’s business model is heavily focused on getting publishers to offer their subscribers with paid subscriptions, almost to a fault. Because of this, the way Substack earns as a company is by taking a 10% cut on the earnings of the writers.

While it might not seem too much for hobby writers and small creators but it’s a significant amount for other writers. If you’re bringing in $100 a month as a writer, that’s not a big deal. But, if your writing is earning you $10,000 per month, that’s $12,000 taken off your earnings every year.

Apart from the 10% cut, Substack seems to be a late adapter of modern technology and is missing several important features like an integrated referral program, advanced analytics system, audience segmentation, and more.

How beehiiv Helps Creators Earn More

For the majority of newsletter publishers, there are two primary sources of income:

1. Paid Subscriptions

2. Ads

beehiiv quickly identified this and built a platform that doesn’t just make it easy for newsletter publishers to create and manage their newsletters, but also makes it easy for them to earn and scale their publications.

Charging a flat price over a revenue cut

Unlike Substack, which takes a 10% cut on the writer’s earnings, beehiiv charges a flat price to its writers. This pricing strategy has turned out to be far less expensive for writers.

In fact, beehiiv claims that for 1500 subscribers who pay $5 monthly, you’ll save around $8,700 more as compared to Substack. This means, if your newsletter takes off, you won’t be penalized by paying thousands.

Ad monetization

For any writer, ads can be a significant source of revenue. However, the amount of time and energy spent on filling the ad inventory is not worth the candle.

beehiiv provides its own integrated ad network where they match publishers to brands. For publishers, it helps to seamlessly monetize their newsletter with premium sponsors while they completely focus on content. For brands, it provides in-depth analytics on the target audience, click-through rate (CTR) ratios, the number of unique readers, open rates, and more, so that they can easily and efficiently run ads.

In an Interview, Tyler Denk mentioned that they are developing a completely different platform for advertisers where they easily choose the publisher as per their needs. Recently, beehiiv also introduced a feature called “Boost“ where publishers can promote their newsletters on other newsletters that run on beehiiv. Boosts works in two ways: to earn more revenue or gain more subscribers. Newsletter creators can pay for Boosts to get more subscribers. Or, they can sign up to get paid by recommending other newsletters to their subscribers.

There’s one crucial element of earning potential we haven’t talked about yet: acquisitions. Even though beehiiv has only been around for two years, there have already been dozens of newsletters that have built, grown, monetized, and sold their entire newsletter business to other companies for a cash out.

With beehiiv, there’s never been a quicker way to grow your newsletter, earn a full-time income, and sell the entire publication for a major payday, as is the case with the Milk Road, which was acquired only 10 months after launching on beehiiv.

All in all, beehiiv has excelled in the earnings department by offering real value to customers through generous revenue sharing with publishers, an extremely user-friendly platform, access to multiple revenue streams, advanced analytics, and a strong focus on meeting publisher needs.

Growth Driver 3: Attract Strategic Investors With Innovative Engineers

The founding team at beehiiv is exclusively composed of engineers, and around 75% of their team has technical expertise, which has significantly helped them scale and quickly push features.

Initially, beehiiv pushed 3-5 features per week. They were hyper-focused on quickly and efficiently shipping the features that actually matter. With their experience at Morning Brew, the team already had a good idea of how to implement and ship these types of products which has helped them quickly create a viable solution in the marketplace.

Here’s a tweet by Tyler where he mentions how they used to hire through Twitter DMs. The team believes in hiring a person with generalist skill sets and an ambitious mindset.

When it comes to raising funds, Tyler mentioned in a podcast that "credibility" was one of the things that gave them an edge while raising seed funding. The beehiiv team has strong industry credibility, as Tyler himself was the second employee at Morning Brew, along with other co-founders (beehiiv was co-founded by Morning Brew alums Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett, and Jake Hurd. ) who were also early employees. Together, they made significant contributions to the infrastructure and tools that enabled Morning Brew's meteoric rise to millions of subscribers, followed by the $75 million purchase by Business Insider.

When raising their seed round, beehiiv prioritized strategic investors, focusing on those who already had a large influence, which would help them expand their reach and pitch their product to potential customers.

During their recent Series A round, Lightspeed Ventures was drawn to beehiiv for three key reasons.

1. The startup had already established a solid platform that stood out to investors.

2. Impressive numbers and growth associated with its SaaS and monetization strategies.

3. The presence of domain experts on the team in charge of product development at beehiiv.

Ultimately, that led to their third round of funding, bringing in $12.5 million in June 2023. While Tyler and the team have raised plenty of funds, he stated in a recent Business Insider article that he doesn’t plan on raising any more in the near future. He shared how beehiiv is projected to be bringing in $1 million monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the end of 2023.

Recap

Overall, beehiiv has set and clear example of how a highly talented and ambitious team with a desire to launch an impactful product can reach heights. Moving forward, beehiiv plans to go beyond newsletters and enter the creator economy with more focus on podcasts and video content, while continuing to excel in the newsletter space. Looking forward to what the future holds for beehiiv. We are excited to be a part of this impactful journey 😃.

That’s all for today. This edition took us about 27 hours of effort. If you think your friends or colleagues would like this, please share this link with them. Thanks for reading and don’t be shy to leave a comment if you have any. Also, please consider following us on Twitter (Keval Jagani, Meet Shukla) and sharing this blog post.

The Newsletter Platform Built for Growth

When starting a newsletter, there are plenty of choices. But there’s only one publishing tool built to help you grow your publications as quickly and sustainably as possible.

beehiiv was founded by some of the earliest employees of the Morning Brew, and they know what it takes to grow a newsletter from zero to millions.

The all-in-one newsletter platform comes with built-in growth tools, customization, and best-in-class analytics that actually move the needle - all in an easy-to-use interface.

Not to mention—responsive audience polls, a custom referral program, SEO-optimized web pages, and so much more.

If you’ve considered starting a newsletter, there’s no better place to get started and no better time than now.

Try beehiiv absolutely free with no credit card required.