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Back in mid-March I hinted that we had a few big launches coming up.

Two weeks ago we launched the beehiiv MCP — making beehiiv the first newsletter platform that you can run directly through Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity.

I wrote my thesis about why this was such a big deal in that week’s newsletter.

In summary: we’re entering a new paradigm where the end user is interacting with software (like beehiiv) more and more through native AI interfaces like Claude. I think the next several years will be defined by companies who are building both for agents and humans; the native web application is no longer the only interface that matters.

The beehiiv MCP gives users the ability to do things like this:

And this:

We have a very strong thesis about the beehiiv MCP (and agentic workflows writ large), and we knew that it was an initiative worth prioritizing.

But transparently, we had very modest expectations prior to launch. It still feels so early.

I’d argue half of our users barely understand the concept of an API, let alone the nascent developments in MCP. We assumed the market wasn’t truly ready for it, and that only a few AI power users would become early adopters.

We were wrong.

Within the first 48 hours, nearly 10% of all paying users on beehiiv requested early access to the beehiiv MCP (btw you can request access here). We now have a vibrant Slack community of hundreds of early adopters pushing the limits of beehiiv with agentic AI workflows.

Anyway, that was the first of the two launches. And it was one of the most successful in recent memory… up until the second launch last week: podcasts.

Podcasts was one of the best received product announcements in company history. Users can now host, distribute, and monetize their podcast directly on beehiiv.

For years, I have been fielding requests from users to support podcasts natively on the platform. It makes a ton of sense: most of our largest and most successful publishers and creators already have podcasts.

They currently have to jump from platform to platform, manage (and pay for) multiple accounts, and ultimately have a fragmented understanding of who their audience is and how they consume content. Some of their audience lives in platform A, others in platform B, and others in platform C, etc.

beehiiv solves that.

In four short years, we have built the infrastructure for anyone with an owned audience: newsletter, website, and now podcasts. The power of having them all live within a single unified platform really starts to compound at scale.

I’m not going to sit here and turn this newsletter into a full product announcement, but give me a minute to cook. What we built is dope. And it’s not just some half-assed add-on feature… it’s a full podcast suite (with a lot more coming soon).

When users upload a new episode to beehiiv, we’ll automatically distribute it to every major podcast platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Castro, and beyond. We even do automatic audio normalization to polish the sound, and create a full transcription for every episode (which helps creators get discovered in search and LLMs).

Because we also host websites for our users, each episode automatically gets its own SEO-optimized webpage to drive traffic and capture subscribers. So instead of sending your audience to Apple, Spotify, or YouTube, you can keep them in your ecosystem.

We didn’t skimp on analytics either: our podcast analytics are built to IAB standards, with breakdowns by country, listening app, device, and operating system, plus episode-level downloads and real-time data. We also built advanced bot-filtering to separate real listeners from noise.

One thing that we have always focused on is providing monetization opportunities to publishers and creators. By hosting your podcast on beehiiv, you can bundle it with your existing subscription and offer a private feed to paying subscribers.

And unlike the other guys…

However, this is just the beginning. We already have a globally scaled ad network with brands like Kalshi, AG1, Hubspot, Roku, etc. who are receiving billions of quality impressions across tens of thousands of newsletters. You could probably imagine a world where we bring those monetization capabilities to podcasts too…

And then video; we got that feedback loud and clear. The people want video and we’re going to give it to them. That’s the direction that the podcast industry is heading in.

Overall, the reception of the launch was incredible. I received hundreds of positive replies to the product announcement email (yeah, I still write those and get all of the replies). Our social channels were poppin’ off, and we even got some coverage in TechCrunch, Variety, and a handful of other niche podcast-focused outlets.

Best of all: we surpassed our Q2 product adoption goal for podcasts within 6 hours of launch.

Like I said from the jump, I don’t view podcasts as some cute add-on feature. I really believe that beehiiv could be a serious player in this industry and serve hundreds of thousands of publishers and creators.

I have a strong thesis on why I believe we can win, and an equally strong thesis as to why podcasts are a bet worth taking:

And coincidentally, OpenAI acquired TBPN for a rumored “low hundreds of millions” on the same day that we launched our podcast feature.

tl;dr — there is an absurd amount of interest and investment flowing into the industry. That means that there’s going to be plenty of new technologies to build, opportunities to pursue, and problems to solve.

Meanwhile, we are notorious for our product velocity, are already home to tens of thousands of some of the world’s top creators and publishers, and have an entire suite of growth and monetization tools to offer. I have so much conviction that we can win.

Since that tweet in mid-March, anyone on beehiiv can now do the following:

No other platform can say that.

We’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible here. These past two weeks were just an appetizer for what’s to come in Q2.

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/back-to-back

Shoutout Grant for the reader submission!

Whiteboard, white sands, and a whole lot of vibes. Would not mind giving a “no blockers” from here.

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

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