We acquired Typedream

No, we didn’t get acquired.

But I won’t bury the lede — I’m thrilled to announce that beehiiv has officially acquired Typedream, an AI-based website builder.

And as per usual, Big Desk Energy eats first. So let’s break it all down 👇.

With Typedream, users can turn their ideas into a full website in just minutes (content, structure, style, etc.) … all without ever needing to write a single line of code.

Here are a few quick-hitters about Typedream:

• They launched out of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 Cohort.

• Were founded by 5 incredibly talented engineers.

• They won the #1 Product of the Month in July 2021 on Product Hunt.

• Typedream is currently home to tens of thousands of active websites for companies, publishers, and creators.

I’ve gotten intimately familiar with their platform (and team) over the past several months and I couldn’t be more excited about what this means for the future of beehiiv. Here’s why…

When we initially launched beehiiv, the focus of the platform was entirely on newsletters. However, a lot of our earliest adopters had previously been using Substack, which provides a simple website for their users. So almost out of necessity, we also opted to provide each of our users a simple website so they could seamlessly collect emails and host their content online.

In the early days we had a pretty opinionated stance on this — we were a newsletter platform first and foremost. There were already dozens of popular platforms that helped people build custom websites (i.e. Webflow, Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, Framer, GoDaddy, etc.).

Meanwhile, the email space was already (and still is) remarkably competitive. It wasn’t worth our time or effort to try and compete on two separate herculean fronts, especially as such a small team.

So we took a dual approach to this:

• We made it simple to integrate with these other web platforms. If you already had an existing website or thought our features were too limited, you could leverage whatever web solution you wanted and simply sync it with beehiiv.

• But we would also occasionally launch new features, customizations, and capabilities for those users leveraging the beehiiv native websites.

And the results were super interesting. People LOVED the new website features, almost notably more than a lot of our other product drops.

Whenever we launched anything new for the native beehiiv websites the engagement on socials would be next level.

It makes sense — your website is your front page, your identity, where all of your content lives, and the first impression you make on new readers and potential customers.

Yes, we did initially have an opinionated stance on not overly investing into the web builder, but good founders (and teams) are able to assess new data and change their opinions and priorities over time. So we spent months earlier this year rebuilding our entire website builder to offer:

• More templates

• Additional styles

• More customizations

• Better overall experience

And surprise surprise — the announcement was one of the most applauded in our history.

And just as we were about to staff up the team and invest even further, I received an email from Typedream’s CEO, Kevin.

I’ve listened to enough startup tales and podcasts to learn sometimes, along the journey, some things just happen to fall into place at just the right time. Time will ultimately tell, but this email and the ensuing weeks just felt like one of those moments.

So as a beehiiv user — what can you expect? And when?

Short answer: the absolute best website builder in the industry, and soon(ish).

The team at Typedream has built a truly beautiful product. I’m going to cheat and include a few images from their landing page to showcase the comprehensiveness of what they’ve built…

Over the next several months you can expect all of that to be available totally native within the beehiiv platform. Plus…

• An all new drag-and-drop web builder.

• A library of hundreds of different web templates to choose from.

• An analytics suite to collect and analyze valuable data around performance and conversion.

• Integrated AI tools to assist with building robust sitemaps, copy, design, and website optimizations.

I’m confident our users will fall in love with the future web capabilities we have in store.

Our mission has always been to build whatever helps our users succeed — providing best-in-class tools for content creation, growth, and monetization. I think Typedream shares the same DNA, and together we are going to create some remarkable things.

During our acquisition diligence, we spoke with key employees who had experience at other website builder companies. Entirely unprompted, they all mentioned that one of the most common feature requests was for email and newsletter tools.

Well, we’ve already got that part down. And now we’ve got a whole lot more.

I think we might be onto something here 😈.

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/beehiiv-acquires-typedream

Huge shoutout to Amir for the reader submission, this office is chill as fuck.

Reply with your own AI generated office and I’ll feature it in an upcoming issue.

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…

• Bill Gurley explains regulatory capture at the All-In Summit and it was phenomenal (YouTube)

• An deepfake video of Dave Chapelle roasting ChatGPT-4o using Claude-Sonnet-3.5. That sentence made 0 sense a few years ago (Twitter)

• I read this entire writeup about the opaque industry of Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) and walked away more confused than I was before. Our health industry is so fucked (NY Times)

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Until next Tuesday 🕺🏽