Hey đź‘‹

Welcome to the beehiiv investor journey.

Below this window is the raw, unedited monthly investor update I sent recapping August 2022 (sent in early September).

Each month you’ll automatically receive the following month’s update (i.e. next, you’ll receive September 2022).

…so you can follow the entire journey from the beginning as if you invested in our seed round.

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This is a private list of beehiiv’s investors, closest friends, and family. Please hold these updates in confidence & do not share. If you no longer want to receive updates, reply and let me know. Inversely, let me know if you want me to add someone on your team that I missed.

Hey all,

Hopefully this email keeps you busy and brings you a bit of joy as you sit in traffic en route to Montauk. August was a huge month for us, and what’s more exciting—a lot of the groundwork has been laid for what I anticipate to be a massive few months ahead. Lots of updates to get to in this one...

⏳ The tl;dr

  • MoM Growth

    • Revenue: +32%

    • MRR: +33%

    • Signups: +76%

    • Active senders: +40%

    • Email volume: +45%

  • Team Size: 7

📢 Primary Updates

Hiring

  • CTO: we’re thrilled to announce the addition of Noah Pryor, who was previously the CTO of Teachable (and their first hire). There are countless parallels between beehiiv and Teachable from both the product and engineering perspective. Noah brings over a wealth of knowledge in the space, along with years of relevant startup experience, given he scaled and lead the engineering org from inception through acquisition. He’ll be starting 9/12.

  • Chief of Staff: will remain unnamed for another few weeks, but she spent nearly 6 years at both Sailthru and CM Group leading all customer success teams, has worked with hundreds of the largest publishers and senders in the world, and has considerable strategic enterprise experience in this space. She will be joining us on 10/3.

Fundraising

  • We have officially completed our Seed+ of $1.5m (SAFE w/ valuation cap of $20m).

  • Huge shoutout to Blue Wire Capital, Creator Ventures, and Social Leverage for leading the way here.

  • And unbelievably excited to introduce the ~30 incredibly impressive angels who participated as well

  • The new capital will be used mostly to scale the team and accelerate growth and traction

  • Worst case scenario (no additional revenue) — this new capital should at worst safely get us into 2024

Revenue

  • The tl;dr above tells most of the story (32% MoM growth in top-line revenue and 33% MoM growth in MRR), but was worth calling out that this was also the largest MoM jump in absolute dollars AND…

    • we have several enterprise clients committed to onboarding in September

    • we are launching a handful of new growth and acquisition initiatives in the next few weeks

    • we plan to introduce an additional revenue stream in the next 4-6 weeks

Product

  • Overall sentiment from users (via Twitter / LinkedIn / surveys / etc.) is overwhelmingly positive on the product side.. and we are still yet to launch several key foundational features.

    • There’s also countless enhancements to be made to existing features which we’ll look to address in next few months

  • We delivered 2 massive initiatives

    • New publication websites — SEO optimized, super fast, new and improved aesthetic, new functionality like popups and email-gating, etc.

    • Email blasts — sending emails to individual segments of users (as opposed to a single campaign to everyone)

  • We shipped dozens of smaller features and enhancements (peep # of product updates below)

  • …and the next 3 weeks are stuffed with large initiatives set to launch

🙏🏽 Asks

  • I'm a broken record but if you or anyone in your network sends a newsletter and they’re not using beehiiv… then send em my way and lets get them onboard. I can pretty confidently say those few remaining gaps in our product offering will be addressed in the next 4-6 weeks, if not sooner.

  • We’re hiring for 2 positions (Software Engineer and Product Manager). To avoid awkwardly introducing me to someone who may not be qualified, if you do know someone who you think would be a good fit please send them here to apply and let me know you did.

✨ Product Updates

The goal is release product updates weekly. These updates are automatically sent to all existing users (so they become aware of the new updates in the platform), but will also be published on social and elsewhere. If you want to receive these update emails, subscribe here.

🏆 Accomplishments / Wins

  • Hard not to callout the product velocity in August as a massive win (the 5 product updates in a month is a record) … and we did that down an engineer. It’s a huge testament first and foremost to the eng team in just how talented and hard-working they are day in and day out, but also worth noting that a lot of these updates were made possible due to big bets we made earlier to pave the way for future gains. We’re starting to see the dividends of those earlier investments and with the addition of Noah in 2 weeks and an additional engineer in the mix soon, this team should be absolutely rolling.

đź“š Failures / Learnings

  • In the wake of Andrew’s unexpected passing in early May, there was a void of leadership on the engineering side, and to make matters worse we were facing one of our first real fires on that front. I took it upon myself to act swiftly and bring on a CTO asap. While Nate (former CTO) was incredibly talented and experienced, it truthfully was just never a perfect fit. I take full blame for that, as I was looking to fill the void of Andrew way too quickly in somewhat of a panic, and it ended up not working out as we had hoped.

    • We parted with Nate on good terms and he’s off doing awesome stuff elsewhere, but given that the CTO is arguably the most important role in a tech company, having some stability here moving forwards (now on our 3rd CTO) will definitely aid the trajectory of the company.

  • And to make the most of these learnings—we worked with Noah on contract for over a month prior to extending an offer, making a more informed decision on both our end and his.

📆 Next month’s priorities

  • Hire a software engineer

  • Hire a product manager

  • Launch and optimize new outbound growth campaigns

  • Prioritize onboarding more enterprise clients

  • Launch and land the new features slated for September

  • 50% MoM revenue growth

  • This update was absolutely electric, I could run through a wall right now.

    • Absurd MoM growth ✅ 

    • Brought on a CTO and CoS ✅ 

    • Closed a round of funding ✅ 

    • Shipped FIVE huge updates with a 7 person team and no CTO ✅ 

  • There were some very dark days in the months following Andrew’s passing. This is the first update in a while that shows real signs of momentum and positivity.

  • We’ve scaled the team considerably since then, and to my knowledge I don’t think we ever shipped 5 updates in a single month since.

  • There’s something really beautiful about a small and efficient team just operating at a remarkably high level. Relative to today (two years later, August 2024), we had such few processes, so few meetings, so few anything. We just put our heads down and hustled, and dealt with the support tickets and bugs and chaos on the fly… and it worked.

See you next month.

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