$2M MRR

I had planned something else to write about today, but I needed to interrupt the regularly scheduled program to announce a little something – beehiiv just surpassed $2M MRR.

👆That thread breaks down exactly how we scaled the company in the early days (with videos). It also took me an entire Saturday afternoon to create, so if you wanted to support the cause and show it some love, I’d appreciate it :).

Lately, I’ve become pretty desensitized from the numbers on the screen. Milestones allow for a nice victory lap on socials (see above) but there are still so many problems to solve and things to build. That said – I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on the journey and share some of the insights along the way.

The first year was a dog fight.

We were the new kids on an already crowded block. There were a few dozen email platforms that were multiple times our size doing tens to hundreds of millions in revenue. Substack had launched four years prior and was already the venture-backed upstart in the industry. Twitter had recently bought Revue to launch native newsletters, and Facebook launched their own standalone newsletter service, Bulletin, with writers like Malcom Gladwell and Erin Andrews.

Perhaps it isn’t a surprise that more than 40 investors passed on our seed round.

When we first launched in November 2021, the platform could barely send emails. Early users were often disappointed with the lack of, well, just about everything. We were just a small team of four and we had our work cut out for us.

But we hustled in those early days (still do). Our goal was to launch one marketable feature every single week. Not because we needed marketing assets, but because we wouldn’t survive otherwise.

Just as we began to build some momentum, we tragically lost our CTO and cofounder (RIP Platty). I thought for sure the ship was going down after that – Andrew was a unicorn engineer and our secret weapon that made everyone else on the team better.

But we persevered.

I was writing code, making product decisions, closing deals, onboarding new customers, running marketing… and spent each night answering support tickets well past midnight. I ran myself into the ground to keep this thing moving.

And of course, I didn’t do it alone. My cofounders and the entire early team are the real heroes. The urgency and passion they brought in the aftermath of Andrew’s passing shaped the DNA of our company.

Feature after feature, problem after problem, we just blocked and tackled our way to a few small wins each week.

During that first summer, I was on a call with an older founder and investor. I spoke with such excitement about the product and the vision for what we were building. Towards the end, I somewhat embarrassingly mentioned that we had just surpassed a measly $30K MRR.

His response: “That’s incredible. That’s the hardest part — you’ll be at $300K MRR in no time.”

And I’ll never forget the way that made me feel. Just a few months prior we had lost our CTO and I thought for sure the company was going to fall apart. When things finally settled, it never got easier. Each passing day felt like a 12-round heavyweight fight.

My battered, sleep-deprived mind couldn’t comprehend what it would feel like to refresh Stripe and see $300K in MRR.

But he was right.

We never took our foot off the gas, and continued to build with the same intensity we always had. The score took care of itself.

The dog days became the golden days. We were shipping a new high-impact feature almost every single week. We became this startup darling with a cult-like following of people who couldn’t help but rave about the product.

We raised a $12.5M Series A in just a single week, then a $33M Series B a year later. It was all-systems-go all the time; scaling the team with incredibly talented people and launching tentpole initiatives month after month.

Working 100 hour weeks didn’t bother me for a second. I was so high on vibes and the palpable momentum of the company fueled me.

That feeling lasted through Q1 of 2025. While we had a blowout quarter on the surface, some cracks had begun to surface. We were spending at irrational levels without any clear direction, and the strategies that were effective in the early days were no longer as impactful.

We ultimately came to the difficult realization that we didn’t have the right leadership, experience, and strategies to scale the company to the next level. We were in a different league, and the playbook that got us from zero to one wouldn’t be the same playbook that took us from one to one hundred.

In July we parted ways with a third of the growth team and decided to go in an entirely different direction. I refer to it as the great growth reset.

We stopped and reevaluated everything: no more spending on paid acquisition, no more webinars and events, no more sending our top affiliate partners on luxury vacations.

You can see the stage of peak irrationality before the reset in the chart. Runway plummeted from 35 months in January to just 16 months in May (i.e. we burned through nearly 20 months of runway in 4 months).

And since the change — we reduced our burn rate by more than 60% and extended runway back to 2.5 years. In retrospect, the reset seems brilliant, but there was nothing easy about it…

What the chart doesn’t show is the five consecutive months of growing MRR by a measly 2-4% MoM. We began 2025 by adding an incremental $1M ARR every few weeks, but the reset sharply compressed our growth rate.

To put things into perspective: we are an unprofitable startup competing in a remarkably competitive industry. We made a deal with the devil to ride this venture-backed trajectory where the only real option is hypergrowth up and to the right.

Refreshing the Stripe dashboard to see days where we added just $300 of MRR was gutting. Momentum is the most powerful force for startups, and we had willingly opted out.

But it was undoubtedly the right decision.

We shifted our focus towards the product. We hosted our first ever Winter Release Event and announced 10 game-changing features that considerably expanded our addressable market. The message was delivered loud and clear: we are much more than a “newsletter platform.”

On the growth side – we got back to the basics and rebuilt the foundation. We invested in data to better understand what was working, rebuilt our marketing site and funnels, doubled the size of the team, and brought on an experienced leader who has led companies to hundreds of millions in revenue.

It was a long 5 months, but when we departed for the holidays, I felt better about the direction and potential of the business than I ever had.

And we came out in January ready to ball. If you zoom in on the screenshot of our MRR, you might notice a vertical uptick at the end. That’s (half of) January.

We have added more MRR in the first half of January than we did in the first half of Q4. We now have the right foundation, team, experience, and initiatives in flight to properly compound this thing. Our revenue goal for 2026 is $50M, and I personally think we’re going to smash that.

I share all of this because on the surface we’re a four-year-old company that just surpassed $2M MRR. But behind-the-scenes it’s been one hell of a journey to get here. Startups aren’t supposed to be easy.

By the way: if you’re curious what tactics worked well for us in the early days, reminder to check out this thread that I spent way too much time creating.

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/2m-mrr

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