Acquisition. Beta. Lauch.

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Alright gather around, I have a great story to share.

Almost a year after acquiring Typedream, we recently gave all paid users access to the new beehiiv website builder. It’s a huge deal.

I’m going to share the full backstory of the acquisition, explain how we ran the beta, and all of the other details leading up to today. But first, I’ll start with some context.

beehiiv offers users the ability to host their website, and also distribute newsletters, all within the same platform. This dual offering between web and email is super powerful, and reduces complexity and platform redundancies for users.

When we first launched the company in 2021, our original website builder (if you’d call it that) was pretty limited. It allowed users to collect emails and display their content, but that’s pretty much it.

Most of our users either enjoyed the simplicity of it, or were far too advanced and instead had their own custom website. The website builder wasn’t a real focus of ours, we instead prioritized launching email-specific features like a native referral program, recommendations, automations, etc.

But every now and then, we would launch a new feature for the website builder… and our users would go wild for it. Those product drops would put up numbers on socials.

That anomaly eventually became an obvious pattern; users desperately wanted more control and flexibility when building their website. The more users I spoke to, the more clear it became that this could become a massive competitive advantage for us.

Out of pure coincidence, right around that time I got connected to one of the Typedream cofounders. He wanted to explore potentially working together.

I wouldn’t consider myself a spiritual person, but sometimes in life I feel like there are signs or opportunities that just serendipitously present themselves at just the right moment. Most success stories come with a few unexpected breaks along the way.

That said, this wasn’t a simple ordeal. Acquisitions are often messy and difficult, and the team (rightfully so) had a ton of pushback:

I’ll try my best to not obnoxiously position myself as the hero, but there have been a handful of times as CEO where I had enough conviction in something that it was worth ignoring people’s feelings and opinions to really push something forward… and this was one of those.

We did our diligence and spent weeks going back and forth with lawyers. There was an 11th hour ultimatum that almost blew up the entire deal… but that’s a story for another time. It officially closed last June, and we brought on three of the cofounders as part of the acquisition.

Typedream, the platform, is still running independently on its own (and surprisingly generating a decent amount of revenue). But the real goal was to leverage their expertise to entirely rebuild the Typedream builder natively within beehiiv.

We moved a handful of engineers over to join the three cofounders and got to work.

Building a website builder is no small task. Wordpress was first released in 2003 and has a massive international developer community. Squarespace launched in 2004, and Wix in 2006. Newer platforms like Framer and Webflow have each raised hundreds of millions of dollars and have been around for more than a decade.

After just six months of maniacal work by the team, we were (kinda) ready to launch a beta. Ever since announcing the Typedream acquisition users were knocking down our door asking for when it’ll be available.

It was still really rough around the edges, but to quote one of my favorites from Reid Hoffman – “if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

Well we were definitely somewhat embarrassed by it, but in January we launched the Beta anyway for users on our Max plan (the most expensive plan). The decision wasn’t driven by revenue, rather we genuinely just needed a way to limit the volume of feedback in the early days… or we would have imploded.

Despite a handful of users complaining about it not being fair, the move worked exquisitely well. Hundreds of users did decide to upgrade to the Max plan (new revenue), and we began to receive a sizable but manageable amount of feedback.

To optimize for tight feedback loops, we added a button directly in the website builder for users to submit bugs. We also created a dedicated Slack channel for beta users to submit feedback, and had a dedicated workflow for the support team to escalate any tickets submitted about the beta.

Operationally we ran a tight ship (arguably the tightest). Each night we would triage and prioritize all outstanding feedback from the day, then assign them for engineers to pick up in the morning. Rinse, wash, repeat for months on end.

The first two months were spent mostly fixing bugs. After that we began doing more user research and spending time improving the UI/UX. We built a seamless four-step onboarding, and launched nearly a dozen professionally designed quick-start templates for users to take advantage of.

That gets us to a few weeks ago, when we announced that the Beta was (finally) available to all users on any paid plan. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive.

We still have a long way to go, but it’s really powerful, and several thousand users have already published beautiful new websites using the platform.

The momentum is palpable; dozens of users are sharing their new websites on socials each and every day.

The plan is for the website builder to eventually be available to all users, including free plans. This is just the final step to expand the aperture of users and feedback prior to the full launch.

I don’t have a definitive timeline on when that’ll be, but one thing I am convinced of is that the ceiling for this is so high. Once you factor in the Ad Network (which is on fire), paid subscriptions (where publishers keep 100% of their revenue), automations, AI, and everything else we’re working on… it’s easy to get excited about the future.

I believe my thesis from a year ago now more than ever: there is a massive competitive advantage to having the most powerful newsletter operating system vertically integrated with a full website builder.

btw if you want to play with the all new website builder, I asked the boss and got a (very rare) discount code to upgrade and give it a spin. Code: BDEDREAM20 for 20% off your first three months (redeem here).

Let me know what you think 🤝.

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/acquisition-beta-launch

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