2026

One of the biggest revenue unlocks for beehiiv in 2025 was compliance. It doesn’t sound sexy, but it helped us accelerate deals and close tons of new revenue.

Fortunately for you, Vanta’s Agent Trust Platform helps fast-moving startups get audit-ready fast and stay compliant. Translation: it’s never been easier to get compliant thanks to Vanta.

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We’re six days into 2026, so let me hopefully be the last person to wish you a happy new year.

It’s so damn good to be back. I took the past two weeks off from writing the newsletter and have two (somewhat contradicting) takeaways:

One: I’m such a sick fuck for writing a weekly 1,500 word newsletter while also building a startup.

As you would assume – beehiiv consumes 99% of my time and mental bandwidth. The newsletter hangs over my head for the entirety of the week, and I dedicate most of my weekends to actually writing it.

Given the two week hiatus, I actually got to enjoy these past few weekends. I didn’t realize how much the newsletter weighed on me until it was (temporarily) gone.

Two: I am so incredibly inspired and motivated to get back to work and dominate 2026.

As much as I enjoy working, I find it ridiculous that some companies expect employees to work the few days between Christmas and New Years (almost as absurd as making people work the Friday after Thanksgiving).

Each year, we give the entire company off for “winter break.” Due to how the dates fell this time around, everyone got to enjoy 11 days off before coming back to work yesterday.

I spent the majority of that time off the grid in Costa Rica: surfing, reading, writing, and relaxing.

Some people enjoy being up in the mountains, others like to stay put where they are. For me, I prefer not to wear a shirt or shoes for days at a time and spend a ton of quality time with friends out in the sun. It’s the perfect reset to unplug and prepare for the year ahead.

But as you could probably imagine, I’m not someone who can sit still for too long. After a couple of days, I start to get that itch to get back to work. I assume it’s analogous with “recharging my battery” or whatever, but I’m currently riding a crazy high of motivation and excitement to build.

I’m not much of a resolutions person; I don’t need the excuse of a new year to force myself into making changes in my life. But I do find the new year to be a great source of motivation to take stock of where I am and set goals for where I want to be.

I wrote this in my notes app over the break. For the sake of accountability, here are my goals for 2026:

My first, second, and third priority in life right now is to build beehiiv into a multi-billion dollar business. I think we have the opportunity to build a generational company, and I anticipate 2026 to be a transformational year for us (see above: $50M revenue).

We spent the majority of Q4 building the foundation to make this possible: we doubled our Growth and Ad Network teams, made a few crucial executive hires, and introduced a suite of new products to considerably expand our addressable market.

Translation: we’re locked and loaded to accelerate this year.

My boy Teddy Rosevelt said, “comparison is the thief of joy.” It’s true, I can’t help but look at a company like Lovable who has $200M ARR within a year of launching and feel a bit of envy.

But focus is the real competitive advantage. It’s not $200M ARR (yet), but in our fifth year of business we’ll exceed $50M of revenue. And I’d anticipate another year of 80%+ growth in 2027 to get us close to $100M.

Most of our largest bets as a company are still ahead of us, many of which we’ll launch later this year. Needless to say, I am super bullish on the future of beehiiv and am incredibly excited to smash this goal.

This newsletter has become my passion project. It’s my creative outlet, my community, and my instrument of choice to document this wild startup journey.

And for good reason; Big Desk Energy has opened up more doors for me than I could possibly fit into a single newsletter… but I’ll try to encapsulate a few into a list:

In addition to being the CEO, I also run the product team here at beehiiv. This newsletter is my secret weapon to making beehiiv the best product in the industry.

Companies often use the term “dogfood” when they allow their employees to test new features before releasing it to users. But I don’t simply “dogfood” beehiiv; I am a legitimate power user.

I personally built my website using the new website builder, I have built dozens of lead magnets and automations, I leverage recommendations and Boosts for growth, and use the editor, dashboards, and analytics on a daily basis. I even launched a digital product a few weeks ago and have over 650 sales 🤯 (you can download my playbook on how I scaled this newsletter to 130K subscribers right here).

I’m building in public using the platform that I’m building (very meta, I know).

That’s all to say – Big Desk Energy is a massive competitive advantage for me (and the business) and I want to continue to scale it in 2026.

Today’s newsletter was sent to 131,540 people, which means I need to find 68,460 more readers by the end of this year. If you’ve ever gotten any value from this newsletter, it’d mean the world to me if you could share this with just one person who you think would enjoy it 🙏.

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For context, as of this writing I have 56.2K followers on LinkedIn and 37.8K followers on X. And truthfully, I’ve never intentionally tried to grow either account.

But after spending the past four years building a platform dedicated to helping content creators grow and monetize their audiences, I don’t need to be convinced any further about the benefits of having a large and loyal following. There are so many second and third order effects to creating valuable content on the internet.

This is the first time that I am going to more intentionally create content on socials. I’m a big believer that this will compound into more brand awareness for beehiiv, more subscribers for the newsletter, more opportunities for me, and better outcomes for all the above.

After initially writing my goals for 2026, I realized that they were all business related… so I added two personal goals at the last minute.

I’ve been loosely practicing Spanish for a few years and would consider myself conversational (albeit conversational for a 7-year-old). In addition to spending a ton of time in Latin America, I do twice-weekly lessons (that I sometimes cancel due to work), and spend a whole 5 minutes on Duolingo each night to extend my streak.

This year I’m going to be more intentional about learning Spanish. According to ChatGPT, B2 is considered “upper-intermediate”:

Voy a lograr esta meta 🎯.

Classifying a vacation as a personal goal feels a bit silly, but after listening to this podcast with Jesse Itzler on how he plans his year, I was inspired to create a goal for the sole purpose of making memories and enjoying life.

Aside from this annual end of year trip to Costa Rica, I haven’t taken a normal vacation during the year since exploring Germany and getting piss drunk at Oktoberfest in 2022.

Well, after four years I think that I’m finally due for a proper vacation. I’m planning a little Eurotrip this summer and anticipate spending some time in the Mediterranean with my absolute boys.

I have to admit, it feels pretty good writing down a goal that doesn’t have a KPI attached to it.

Because we’re all about accountability here, feel free to reply to this email with a few goals of your own. Let’s have a killer 2026 together 🤝.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/2026

I’m renting a house with Houck (founder of Founding Journey) in Tamarindo, Costa Rica in February with 7 other founders. We’ll be working, vibing, and delivering shareholder value. Other details:

This is pretty damn close to a dream office setup. What I would do to lock in from here…

Think you can generate a better office? Reply with your submissions 📨.

Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

Turn on, tune in, drop out. Click on any of the tracks below to get in a groove — each selected from the full Big Desk Energy playlist.

Share this newsletter with your friends, or use it as a pickup line.

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