A hunnid.

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Last January I began writing weekly and launched this very newsletter. 16 months later and Big Desk Energy just surpassed 100,000 active subscribers 🤯.

If you were wondering what 100,000 people looked like — my subscribers could fill Ohio State’s football stadium and collectively read the newsletter together on the jumbotron. First a national championship, now this?

When I started the newsletter, my goal was to share the entire raw and unfiltered startup journey, as told from my perspective. It was meant to be a full access pass to everything we’re doing behind-the-scenes at beehiiv… in hopes that it would inspire other founders and prevent them from making a lot of the same mistakes that I did.

There’s plenty of startup content out there, but most of it is watered down, filtered, or told with a heavy mix of hindsight bias and revisionist history. I thought Big Desk Energy would be unique because you’re growing up with the company in real-time, and no-one (myself included), has any idea how this story will end.

And grown up we have!

When I first launched the newsletter, beehiiv had less than 40 employees and $500K MRR. Today, the company has scaled to nearly 100 global employees and we’re currently generating over $2M of revenue per month.

My early subscribers have been through it all, each step of the way.

The Journey.

When we raised our $33M Series B. Surpassed $10M ARR. Our 2024 company offsite. The Typedream acquisition. An absurdly successful 2024 Black Friday. And some of our largest product launches to date.

The beehiiv Operating System.

I’ve more or less published our entire operating system as a company: focus days, traction, dogfooding, the weekly success list, board meetings, and our product velocity playbook.

The Lessons.

I’ve made a ton of mistakes and have turned those lessons into practical insights other founders can use. Examples include how to build in public, how to send investor updates, how to announce a fundraise, how we ship product, and a whole lot more.

The Struggles.

At times the startup journey has been a lonely and harrowing one. I’ve frequently caught myself in a downward spiral of stress and anxiety, and the newsletter has served as a therapeutic outlet on several occasions.

Last week I shared the story of our CTO and cofounder who tragically passed away, here’s 1,500 words of seemingly hopeless venting, and this unhinged post that I don’t think serves any real purpose but was one of the most highly praised pieces I’ve ever written.

Personal Life.

Founders contribute a ton to the DNA and culture of the entire company. I’ve peeled back the curtain a bit to share more about me, the founder person behind all of this. Splitting time between LA and Medellin, my love for working weekends, and a little timezone arbitrage to optimize my workdays on the west coast.

Essays.

I’ve written about the transfer of wealth to the developing world via remote work, why Meta to this day is still remarkably undervalued as a business, and why Substack’s misaligned incentives with their users will eventually come to head.

That doesn’t even cover half of the content that I’ve written these past 16 months.

But Big Desk Energy has transcended beyond simply being another newsletter. It’s become a valuable resource and hub for tens of thousands of active and aspiring founders.

I have “open-sourced” almost everything that I have done while building beehiiv and made it available to others to take advantage of:

• I created a Remote Handbook to help founders build efficient remote-first companies.

• You can sign up and receive every single monthly investor update I have ever sent (entirely raw and unedited).

• You can download the beehiiv seed deck and the deck I used to raise our extension round.

• I even made our $33M Series B deck available (although that requires you sharing the newsletter with just one person to get access).

By the way, here is your unique referral code to share this newsletter with a friend: https://mail.bigdeskenergy.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

The real litmus test for this newsletter was whether or not I could translate this magical thing we have on the internet to something a little more real. Last year I decided to host a founder mastermind in Costa Rica and had nearly 50 founders who read the newsletter apply to join.

Those 4 days in Costa Rica were so impactful that I decided to host a second, and a third. In total, we now have this private community of 20 ridiculously talented founders that I also consider friends and mentors.

I actually have just a few spots left for the fourth founder mastermind this July (you can learn more and apply here).

I can’t believe this silly Spotify playlist of mine transformed into a website, then to a newsletter, and then ultimately into an incredible IRL community.

Lastly, I have some exciting news to announce 🥳. In the spirit of building things, doing things, and trying things…

I’m launching DenkBot — an AI assistant that’s available for free to Big Desk Energy readers.

It’s powered by one of my favorite AI companies, Delphi, and has been trained on everything I’ve ever written, all of my social media posts, every podcast interview I’ve ever done, and a handful of other resources (like beehiiv support docs).

It’s also trained on my voice, which means you can have full conversations with it. Click “Voice” — it’s pretty wild (and a little long-winded at times).

I think the paradigm of searching and filtering archives of content for answers will soon be a thing of the past. Rather, you can simply chat with DenkBot for anything related to startups, beehiiv, newsletters or anything else really.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

That’s all for now. Next stop: 200,000 🫡

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/a-hunnid

Shoutout McCall for the reader submission 🫡.

I’ve recently come to realize that I’ve optimized my life to avoid the cold at all costs, but this is a nice view. 5.5/10 office.

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

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.

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

• I don’t know how I just discovered the Robinhood Gold Card but it’s actually beautiful and 3% points on everything is 🤯 (Robinhood)

• The “horseless carriages” of the AI era (Pete Koomen)

• I joined This Week In Startups to chat all things beehiiv and tech (YouTube)

• George Mack joined MFM in what was a great conversation (My First Million)

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

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Until next Tuesday 🕺🏽

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