Chapter 3

What a wild ride — this Friday marks three years since launching beehiiv. Fast forward to today and the company…

• Is generating nearly $2M per month.

• Has 75 employees located across the globe.

• Sends over 2B emails each month.

🤯 🤯 🤯

The media ecosystem is evolving right before our eyes. Owning your audience and distribution has never been more critical for creators, publishers, and businesses alike.

And it’s working…

beehiiv powers tens of thousands of the most popular newsletters in the world. Collectively they reach over 225M readers, and have taken home over $13M in earnings directly via our monetization features.

In the past, I’ve used our company anniversary (birthday?) as an opportunity to reflect and share the highs and lows from the year. If you’re new to the function, you can read the previous ones here: Chapter 1 & Chapter 2.

Perhaps it’s recency bias at play, but I think this was our best year yet. Roll the highlights 🎞️.

Series B

In April we announced a $33M Series B led by NEA, and backed by Lightspeed, Sapphire Sport, DST, and others.

Truthfully, we didn’t need to raise additional capital (which by the way, is the best time to raise additional capital). We had over $10M in the bank and were growing steadily, but our burn began to creep up a bit at the beginning of the year.

It was one of those true fork in the road moments when building a company:

• Option A: Slow and steady.

  • Hold off on additional hires, monitor spend a bit more closely, try and remain close to breakeven.

• Option B: Send it.

  • Identify gaps in bandwidth and hire people to plug them, accelerate the roadmap, ramp up paid acquisition.

And while that’s obviously a bit of an oversimplification, both options have their merits and tradeoffs. I’ll share the full breakdown and game theory of the decision in a future post, but here’s the tl;dr:

1. Momentum is everything. We had been riding a ton of it to kick off the year and Option A would have required us to voluntarily slow it.

2. We operate in a very competitive and mature market. I don’t ever want to be at a disadvantage due to a lack of capital.

3. The product is always the worst it’ll ever be today; tomorrow it’ll be a little better. I’d rather be over-capitalized during our worst days and survive to see our best days ahead.

As part of our Series B fundraise, unconventionally, we reserved $1M of allocation for our most loyal users to invest. Our competitive advantage has always been putting our users above all else. Allowing them to become shareholders and participate in the upside was a no brainer for me.

Typedream Acquisition

Not long after closing our Series B we opted to put that capital to work. We acquired Typedream, an AI-based website builder, back in June.

For context, we had always been a newsletter platform first and foremost. Because of that, our website functionality was always somewhat of an afterthought.

But we noticed something interesting — whenever we launched any new features or customizations for our web product, our users absolutely raved about them. When we launched our latest website builder back in April, it was one of the most applauded updates in company history.

That’s what I consider a signal.

So we acted on that signal, and made an offer to join forces with Typedream.

Since then, we’ve been working hand-in-hand with the Typedream team to build on their mission, creating a robust platform that integrates newsletter and website creation into a single, unified experience.

Coming soon…

Company Offsite 2024

In June, 70 beehiiv employees descended onto Montreal for our annual company offsite.

We’re a remote company with globally distributed employees. This was the first time the majority of people got to meet each other face-to-face, myself included. And while I couldn’t be more bullish on building a remote-first company, there’s no getting around just how amazing it was to get the team together IRL.

We collaborated on some big projects, shared presentations, visited some of Montreal’s top restaurants, went to a Polo & Pan concert, and robbed the city of all their Don Julio 1942 (thanks NEA).

Some of my takeaways from the week…

• We have done such a tremendous job hiring a team of smart, high-integrity, and ambitious people who are genuinely a joy to be around.

• We have built such a unique culture on hard mode (i.e. remote) and it 100% translated and cemented itself IRL.

• That wasn’t just fun by “work event” standards… the overwhelming consensus was that was a ridiculously fun week.

• Montreal is an astounding city.

• We could have spent 10x on that offsite and it still would have been worth every dollar.

As for 2025…

Hot Girl Feature Summer

Don Julio aside, our goal is to transform how people create and distribute content online. To do that successfully, we need to launch a ton of powerful features…

The most ridiculous part about that tweet is that it only mentions about half of the things we launched in Q2.

As for Q3, I’d argue we shipped some of the most innovative features in the industry:

• Mobile app: Your readers can install your custom app and add it to their home screen.

• Audio newsletters: Transform your newsletter into audio your subscribers can listen to. 

• New editor: One of the best publishing experiences on the internet.

• Subscriber preferences: The easiest way to create unique experiences for your readers.

• RSS to Send: Allows teams to effortlessly populate their newsletters with content directly from their website.

• Paid newsletters: Turn your content into recurring revenue with a suite of subscription tools and dashboards.

In just three short years, you could argue that beehiiv has grown into one of the most robust and powerful email platforms on the market. It’s also one of the few that doesn’t take a penny of subscription revenue generated by its users.

Translation: actually creator-first.

Ad Network

In October we launched one of the most impactful updates in company history. CPM Deals: guaranteed payouts, based on impressions, from top global brands.

It puts us one step closer to building what I believe is a multi-billion dollar opportunity, and I’ll explain why. First, a quick refresher on ad terminology:

• CPA (cost per acquisition): Publishers earn when a conversion happens.

• CPC (cost per click): Publishers earn each time someone clicks.

• CPM (cost per mille): Publishers earn for every 1,000 impressions.

While there are certainly pros and cons to each, CPM is widely considered the most publisher-friendly.

For example, let’s pretend this newsletter receives 50,000 unique opens per send. A $20 CPM deal through the beehiiv Ad Network would net me $1,000 in ad revenue… each time I send.

We’re not talking small-time sponsorships, either. The beehiiv Ad Network connects publishers with hundreds of top-tier brands like Netflix, Hubspot, Notion, Roku, Hims, Deel, and many more.

Publishers on beehiiv now regularly receive competitive CPM and CPC deals, offering them favorable monetization opportunities and optionality at scale.

Plus, we have a handful of Machine Learning Engineers building models with audience data, content, advertiser copy, conversions, and everything in between. The goal is to optimize for both better advertiser performance and higher publisher payouts.

Translation: it’s only going to get a lot better.

Looking Ahead…

Some of the most exciting initiatives of 2024 are still yet to launch. Hard to believe, I know, but stay tuned later this week 🤫.

It’s really amazing to see all of the pieces starting to come together. I think our users are going to absolutely love what’ll be possible in the coming few months (and years).

Shopify President, Harley Finkelstein, famously said in 2021: “We are arming the rebels… the entrepreneurs, the small business owners, the independent brands, and the rebels are winning.”

If Shopify is arming the rebels of digital commerce, beehiiv is arming the rebels of digital communication.

We’re still so early.

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/chapter-3

STEAL MY PLAYBOOK.

Yesterday I dumped our sales data into ChatGPT, performed a ton of data analysis, extracted key insights, and shifted our entire sales go-to-market strategy. This took 25 minutes.

If that sounds foreign to you, no need to sweat. HubSpot created the ultimate guide on how to use ChatGPT at work. I’ve read dozens of resources; this one is the gold standard.

…and it’s entirely free to download.

The guide includes 100 actionable prompts that you can begin using immediately. I legitimately use a handful of these almost every single day.

Shoutout Nigel for the reader submission, who claims to have one of Australia’s best surf breaks right outside his office window (this is a recreation of it).

Give me an office along the Gold Coast, floor-to-ceiling windows, walking distance from the beach… and I’d be a happy camper.

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…

• Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds towaard a 100-year vision (Lenny’s Podcast)

• 2013 DoorDash YC application video (Startup Archived)

• I’ve never heard this story about Instagram or Gmail but it’s brilliant (Rafid Hoda)

• MUD/WTR masterclass of a Google ad 👇️ 

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Until next Tuesday 🕺🏽

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