Appropriately Hyping

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This Thursday we are livestreaming the first ever beehiiv Winter Release Event.

While I am doing my best to appropriately hype the occasion, I’m pretty confident that we’ll deliver. We’re planning to announce some of the biggest updates and news in company history (btw you can RSVP here).

If you’re already a beehiiv user, or are following me or any of our employees on socials, this shouldn’t be a surprise to you. In fact, if we’ve been doing our jobs well, this should be the 40th time you’ve heard about the event.

And that’s by design.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about my thesis, our big bet, and the full behind-the-scenes and aftermath of the event. But today I wanted to share how we’ve been able to successfully build hype for the event and achieve 10,000 RSVPs in just a few short weeks.

Here’s how it all went down…

The first step was to align on the brand identity of the event. We started with a moodboard. Our wonderful designer and I pulled together a few other popular tech keynote events for inspiration.

After lots of experimentation, we began to hone in on what ultimately became the final iteration. The concentric shapes were meant to symbolize the company's outward expansion into new categories and possibilities, while also remaining itself at its core.

After aligning on the brand identity, the next step was to build a beautiful landing page to drive traffic to and collect RSVPs. We landed on a custom animation that turned out really sweet (you can see it here).

We also built a custom calendar integration that would automatically add the event to each person's calendar immediately after submitting their email. I viewed this as non-negotiable to ensure that we maximize the attendance of the event. Speaking for myself, if it’s not on my calendar it might as well not exist.

With the landing page complete, we were technically ready to go live with promotion… but we instead decided to send early invites to a list of VIPs. This VIP list consisted of over 2,500 people: journalists who cover tech and startups, VCs, large creators, enterprise users, etc.

I sent each of them a personal email about the event and asked them to RSVP.

The early invites went out on Thursday October 2nd, six full weeks prior to the event. The following Tuesday was our go-live day to publicly promote the event to everyone, which we chose mostly because I send this newsletter on Tuesdays.

Speaking of this newsletter, I kicked off the promotion by sharing how the Winter Release Event came to be, which read a bit like an incoherent stream of consciousness. Immediately after publishing the newsletter, we sent broader comms to all of our active users, then published across all of our social channels.

We also created a ton of custom assets for employees to update their social profiles to ensure that the event was omnipresent. A bunch of us updated our banner photos on LinkedIn and X. I also updated my name on X to Tyler Denk (RSVP → WRE25) 🐝 to be extra obnoxious.

Outside of social, some of the most frequent touchpoints with users and contacts happen via support tickets and emails. So we updated the default signature that’s included in all support tickets and personal emails to have a simple CTA about the event.

Meanwhile, our social team has been pumping out tons of great content from the house account on a daily basis. It was a perfect mix of behind-the-scenes content, teasers, and playing into the latest social trends.

The numbers back it up too. Each month our social lead creates a report with an analysis of engagement across all social channels, and the Winter Release Event content was consistently some of the best performing since we began creating these reports.

We also cultivated an employee advocacy program internally, which led to people pumping out tons of their own unique content.

Meanwhile, I was dropping teasers of my own…

Behind the scenes, we were pulling a few other levers too. We added a banner on the marketing site and in the app itself to notify users about the event. I sent a few additional nudges to our VIP list, and we sent a few larger email campaigns to our most active users.

We also launched a Media Pass program and invited a select few power users to participate. The purpose of the program was to give them a first look at the updates, invite them to a private beta, and give them direct access to our team for support and commentary.

In exchange for the exclusive access, the participants were (strongly) encouraged to promote the upcoming event and publish stories on launch day. We purposefully chose users who create content about media, startups, and the creator economy knowing that their coverage would be the most valuable for us.

Many of the Media Pass participants are also active members of the beehiiv Partner Program (i.e. they get paid 50% of all revenue associated with users that signup with their link). By simply promoting and covering the upcoming event, they could generate thousands of leads and tens of thousands of dollars in earnings.

By the way: anyone can join the beehiiv Partner Program for free at any time (it’s one of the most generous affiliate programs around).

For the past five weeks we have attempted to blanket the internet promoting the event. Based on the responses, I think it’s worked pretty well.

Can we possibly deliver on all of the hype? RSVP and let me know how you think we did.

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/appropriately-hyping

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