beehiiv go vroom

I’ll be totally honest — compliance was not at the top of my priority list to start 2025.

…Until I learned that beehiiv was potentially losing out on tons of enterprise deals due to a lack of certifications. Fortunately, we’ve been working with Mastermind to resolve that pronto.

Mastermind performs certification assessments against popular standards (like ISO 27001 and ISO 27701).

Translation: they help get your company certified, so you can look legit to prospects and unlock more revenue 🤑.

Their team has a long history certifying companies like Google, Datadog, Twilio, Atlassian, GitHub, Honeywell, and hundreds of others.

Don’t see your company on the list? Maybe it’s time to finally give a shit about compliance. Plus, Big Desk Energy readers will save 40% on all certifications (trust me, that’s an absurd deal).

Not sure if you’re company is certification ready? Take a free course to find out.

Last Friday at beehiiv we launched a massive new product: Direct Sponsorships.

It allows publishers (i.e. newsletters) to manage their own sponsorship packages and book revenue directly with advertisers — all through the beehiiv platform.

Typically I use this newsletter to share some of the behind-the-scenes stories and insights as we scale the company in real-time. Today I’m going to go a bit deeper into the product strategy behind this launch and why I think it’s such a massive opportunity.

But first, let me explain how we got here.

Back when I first joined Morning Brew in 2017, we had a single daily newsletter that we sent to about 100,000 readers.

If you were a brand who wanted to get in front of that audience, of which there were many, for the reasonable price of $10,000 you could have your logo at the top of our newsletter along with 150 words of custom copy.

Fast forward a few years and the daily newsletter had an audience of over 3M readers. We also introduced a few additional ad units, which in total correlated to about $75,000 of revenue per day.

That’s right — each morning when we hit send we earned basically the full time salary of a single employee. Newsletters are a good business 👍.

But it wasn’t all so simple…

In summary: we had nearly 20 sales-adjacent employees and custom-built software to appropriately monetize the newsletter.

The thing is, not every newsletter has both of those things at their disposal to be able to monetize with sponsorships like we did.

Enter: beehiiv 🐝.

Yes, we make it dead simple to create and send beautiful email newsletters.

Yes, you can launch a totally custom website to host your content (and a whole lot more) in just a few clicks.

Yes, the platform is loaded with automations, dashboards, growth tools, and just about everything else we leveraged at Morning Brew to build a world-class media company.

But we also help our users monetize their content.

The beehiiv Ad Network is a totally native solution to add premium sponsors (Netflix, HubSpot, Roku, Deel, Hims, etc.) into your newsletter in just a few clicks. Today publishers are earning nearly $1M per month via the beehiiv Ad Network 😮‍💨.

Despite that, due to market dynamics the beehiiv Ad Network can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution (yet). Which means that some of our largest publishers continue to sell some of their ad inventory themselves.

But it’s not easy. To run a successful ad-supported media company you need to manage inventory, source new opportunities, build and sell sponsorship packages, collect brand assets from advertisers, build performance reports, handle invoicing and payments, and a whole lot more.

That clusterfuck of a process is handled via a hodgepodge of tools like Google Sheets, Notion, Stripe, Airtable, DocuSign, Trello, and a handful of inventory management platforms that charge a sizable 5-10% fee for each and every placement.

My cofounders and I built a bespoke solution when we worked at Morning Brew that streamlined this entire process end-to-end in a single platform. (It was a secret weapon).

Well, we did it again. And as of last Friday, it’s available to anyone who uses beehiiv.

Here’s my sponsorship storefront for Big Desk Energy.

Now I can manage relationships with advertisers, inventory, billing, and everything else directly in beehiiv.

It’s even better than what we had built at Morning Brew because today beehiiv has an entire ecosystem of products and features to make it more powerful.

My competitive advantage as a founder has always been that I feel like I understand our users better than anyone in the world. When you really nail a launch, the people typically let you know…

All of this comes on the heels of launching a powerful new website builder back in January that makes it seamless to build beautifully designed websites with no code. Like legit, world class websites with full customization and powerful integrations.

beehiiv has become much more than just another newsletter platform. We’re an entire content and monetization engine… and we’re just getting started.

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-go-vroom

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