August 2022

Holy shit – so a couple days ago I stumbled across our monthly investor update from two years ago (August 2022) and it’s an absolute gem.

But to really understand just how meaningful this update is to me, I have to first provide a bit of context…

When my cofounders and I began building what is now beehiiv, it was just a side project. The odds were definitely stacked against us — far too often life tends to get in the way of these sort of things.

• We were all balancing demanding full-time jobs.

• We each moved away to three different cities.

• Ben and Jake were getting married and starting families.

beehiiv consumed our nights and weekends: something we poured every waking moment of our free time into. And for 10 strenuous months, we did just that, without any guarantee it’d ever lead to anything.

Everything back then felt so incredibly fragile and uncertain.

At any moment, our competitors could have launched something to crush our conviction. Or perhaps one of us received a job offer that was too good to turn down. Or maybe staring down a near endless roadmap of stress and anxiety pushed one of us to realize — having a stable, well-paying job isn’t all that bad.

We were so burnt out during this stretch. But miraculously we pushed through and after nearly a year of building, we had something to show for it. The prototype we built was enough to raise a seed round in the summer of 2021.

The first few months after launching a company are super weird. It’s like a miracle in itself that you’ve even made it to this point, but in actuality you’re not anywhere — you’re just at the starting line.

Then when strangers on the internet begin signing up and paying for your product you’re overcome with excitement and disbelief. It feels almost too good to be true: it’s working!

But it’s also so remarkably difficult. We were in the big leagues now, competing with companies and products that were so far superior to our nascent project. I was routinely up working past midnight answering support tickets and everything.

Nothing worked as expected, things were constantly breaking, and users would flood my inbox to let me know. I was the Head of Product, Head of Growth, VP of Customer Support, Onboarding Specialist, Account Manager, Software Engineer, Head of Sales, Designer, QA Engineer… and probably a few other roles. We all were.

One minute we would be on top of the world, the next we’d realize how fragile everything was and that this entire ship could sink at any given moment.

Fast forward to April 2022 — we’ve been live now for about 6 months. According to Stripe, our MRR was a cool $7.5K. Hell, that’s almost $100,000 /year.

✅ Product Market Fit
✅ Incredible Team
✅ Accelerating Revenue

It’s difficult to describe just how badly I’ve wanted this all my life. I used to frequent the TechCrunch home page every single morning. My bookshelf is littered with business books and biographies of people like Steve Jobs. I had tried and failed at this startup thing quite a few times prior to beehiiv.

…And here we were 6 months in and it’s actually fucking working. We’ve got liftoff boys 🚀 !!

Then on April 29, 2022 our CTO and cofounder, Andrew Platkin, unexpectedly passed away. I can’t even write that sentence without choking up. It was the worst day of my life.

Andrew was an absolutely beautiful human — he was so selfless and genuine. He was also a unicorn engineer and hustled like he had the largest chip on his shoulder. My other cofounders and I would joke that our most important job was to ensure he was happy and never left.

Against all odds we had somehow broken through the trenches of those early startups days and were on our way to building something truly special… only to tragically lose our friend and arguably the most important person on the team.

While writing this post, I actually found the email I sent to the team that weekend and am choosing to share it publicly for the first time.

That left 7 of us, and as you could imagine, we hadn’t exactly planned for a catastrophic event like this to occur. Instead, the current state of affairs at the time:

• We had just begun to experience our first real scaling issues… something Andrew was in the midst of resolving himself.

• We had already fallen behind on our roadmap, and this certainly wasn’t going to help expedite anything.

• The entire team was devastated. He was a role model to everyone at the company, especially the engineers.

• I’m mourning his death while routinely waking up to emails from dozens of angry users about the platform not working properly.

Just a few weeks prior I’d wake up each morning and pinch myself — we were growing and really doing the thing. Now, I was almost certain this entire company was about to crumble down around us… although I never let that show for a moment.

The next few months were unbearingly difficult. Aside from the sadness of it all: we rushed a CTO hire that wasn’t a great fit, we jumped from fire to fire, growth and product development slowed to a halt.

Everything that made us great in those early days — the product velocity, the momentum, the energy — was so totally absent. We were just trying to stay afloat.

So a couple days ago when I stumbled across the investor update I wrote in August 2022, it struck a real chord. It was a banner month by every measure:

• MRR was up 33% month-over-month.

• Signups were up 76% month-over-month.

• We shipped FIVE product updates in a single month.

• We closed a full round of funding ($1.6M seed extension).

• We made two critical hires: CTO and Chief of Staff.

We did all of that with just 7 people on the team.

Today, we have nearly 75 employees. I think our product velocity is world-class if we can launch 2 or 3 product updates in a single month. But we shipped FIVE with just 4 engineers.

We almost doubled our signups relative to the prior month, and these were back in the days before we spent a dollar on acquisition… so that’s all organic baby. Ditto on the MRR growth.

We hired a CTO in Noah, who has been remarkable and is still leading the engineering team today. And a Chief of Staff in Preeya who has excelled in every sense and is now our COO.

Despite the market conditions and the pullback of spring 2022, we put together a strong round to inject more capital into the business… at nearly double the valuation from the year prior.

I re-read the investor updates from the months prior to this one, and they read as if we were just scraping by. But August 2022 exudes momentum and resilience. It was the first time in months, since the passing of Andrew, where it felt like this was our narrative to own.

I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone, but it’s undeniable that it has shaped the DNA and culture of the company. In a startup environment where problems often seem indefinite and insurmountable, it offers valuable perspective — whatever we’re facing now isn’t all that terrible. We’ve overcome far worse before.

It’s also proof that we can punch way above our weight. That shit sticks with you. It’s hard to ever come to the conclusion that “we can’t” do something these days… because I know we can. We’ve done it before, with far less people and firepower than we have today.

After stumbling across the update, I forwarded it to the entire team: we need more August 2022.

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

• 🚨 Last call: I’m hosting 7 founders in Costa Rica for an elite all-inclusive Mastermind event in October (Apply)

• Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek on why Europe should embrace open-source AI (The Economist)

• 10 new features from iOS 18 (Twitter)

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