Forever Summer

The most underrated skillset as a founder: storytelling.

The beehiiv “story” is what allowed me to raise millions from investors, hire talented employees, and continues to motivate our employees to work towards our ambitious goals.

All of this would have been much easier if I had known about Untold sooner. Untold helps early-stage founders and GPs communicate what they’re building and why it matters.

Trusted by breakout startups like Tennr and industry legends like Andy Gavin (co-founder of Naughty Dog) — they are the best in the industry for helping early-stage teams with:

If you have an upcoming fundraise, brand launch, or want to deliver content that resonates with your audience and customers → Untold only has a few available spots remaining for the summer.

Well, that was a whole lot of fun.

Last week we hosted the first ever beehiiv Summer Release Event, and based on the overwhelming reaction, I think we nailed it. I want to take you behind the scenes and share exactly how it all came together and why I’m so excited about what’s next.

The seed was actually planted last July in Costa Rica, during one of my founder masterminds. In retrospect, that’s such a massive testament to the importance of surrounding yourself with other builders and founders. I’ll probably host another one later this year — add yourself to the waitlist if you’re interested.

Kieran was the cofounder at Shopgenie (now exited) and told a story about hosting a live launch event with all of his customers and prospects. It was just a simple Google Meet, but it gave him a platform to share his latest updates and get users excited. He closed almost a million dollars from the big event.

In contrast, at beehiiv we ship dozens of updates every single week. On average, twice a month we send a Product Update that highlights a handful of new features. That product velocity has compounded over time and has become a huge part of our success.

That playbook has been on autopilot for years, but Kieran’s story inspired me to try something new.

I looked at our product roadmap and realized that several of our largest initiatives were on schedule to launch around the same time last fall. I pitched the idea of hosting a Winter Release Event and announcing them all together.

My initial vision was also a simple Google Meet where I would demo the new products live and take questions from our users. That quickly escalated to hiring a production team and flying a few people out to New York to create a polished pre-recorded launch event with special effects and all.

Last November we hosted a livestream for the event, and it was a massive success. Users and prospects attended in droves, we launched ten incredible new features, drove real revenue, got lots of press, and built a ton of momentum for the business.

Most importantly — we broke through the noise in a crowded startup ecosystem. We punched way above our weight and introduced ourselves to a lot of new people that week.

Fast forward to March of this year, and we were once again preparing to kick off four massive product initiatives all at once. One of them (Community) was such a significant launch that it would have been a disservice to simply send an email to our users about it.

Community has been our most-requested feature for the past year, by a mile. Even when I was teasing the Winter Release Event back in the fall, tons of users commented hoping that community features would be part of the upcoming release.

The signal was there. I rallied the troops and made the case that we should run it back, this time bigger and better than before. Better launches, better branding, better scripting, better studio space, better animations, better soundtrack, better marketing plan, etc.

Here’s exactly how we pulled it off:

First, I needed to align with the product and engineering teams on the timeline of each of the upcoming initiatives. I needed to know exactly what would be going live as part of the event, and they needed to know that we were counting on them to deliver.

Once we had a good sense of that, we could start building the brand identity of the event. This was one of my favorite parts, and I owe it all to our creative director and designers. They came up with a beautiful theme and design system to communicate “the future, in focus.”

Next, we needed to find studio space and schedule a date to film the event. We discovered this beautiful loft in Greenpoint and landed on a date in early May that worked with everyone’s schedules.

One of the most difficult parts of the entire process was scripting. Writing a script about products and features that are still several months away from launching isn’t easy. And once the recording is complete, there’s no going back.

Back in the fall, I had no idea what to expect on set when we recorded the Winter Release Event. This time around, we came in guns blazing (literally) and ripped through the event in just a few hours.

Entirely separate from the main programming, we wanted to create an intro video that really set the tone for the event. We found a different production company that specialized in these types of films, and worked on a script and storyline to bring that vision to life.

Then we shifted to marketing. This was me kinda tweaking in Slack ten weeks prior to the event:

I’ll admit, there is a big tradeoff you should consider if you’re going to pursue a similar initiative: time. This was all-encompassing for several months.

Look at how much of my mindshare this event has ten full weeks before the big day. By the time I sent that message, we had already spent a month of planning and scripting. And that list was just a tiny fraction of the things that we actually needed to deliver.

We built a beautiful landing page for people to sign up and RSVP:

We sent a steady stream of emails to our users to encourage them to join. I even personally emailed several thousand people from my contact list.

The entire company updated their banners on their social profiles and added custom email footers encouraging recipients to RSVP.

Meanwhile, we had a steady drip of social content to keep the hype building over the course of the promotion period.

We also onboarded about a dozen beta users to get early access to our Community product. In exchange, they were asked to promote the event on their socials in the weeks leading up to it.

While all of that is happening, I was deep in the weeds operating as a product manager across all of the new products and features. It’s an all-out sprint to get these live across the entire product, engineering, design, and QA teams. Ultimately none of the promotion matters if the new releases don’t deliver.

Meanwhile, for the past month we’ve been trading emails nonstop with both production companies: iterating creative direction, offering feedback, and making edits around the clock. The final version that aired on Thursday was almost unrecognizable from the first few cuts we received. It took a whole lot of work and patience to dial it in.

When it was all said and done — we had nearly 15,000 RSVPs, a super polished film ready to stream, and a handful of massive launches that were finally ready for primetime.

It’s a little crazy to think that I created the #proj-summer-release-event-2026 Slack channel back on March 30th. I wanted bigger and better this time around, and I think we delivered.

If you weren’t able to join us live, you can watch the recording and all 21 minutes of its glory here. As I said before, it’s genuinely the project that I’m most proud of in my entire career.

As for what we announced…

Community.
Rather than stitching their newsletter together with Discord or Slack, users can launch fully branded communities, create discussion spaces around their content, and offer exclusive experiences for paid subscribers.

Copilot.
Our in-app agent that never sleeps, knows your audience, and is ready whenever you need it. You can think of Copilot as a native MCP, but built directly into the beehiiv platform.

Visual Editor.
We've built the best writing experience on the internet. It’s a true what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor, with real-time collaboration, additional design capabilities, and so much more.

Programmatic Ads.
The newest way to earn via the beehiiv Ad Network. Drop a Programmatic Ad block into your newsletter, and we’ll automatically fill it with the most relevant, highest-paying opportunity for your audience.

Podcasts.
Host, distribute, and monetize your show where your audience already lives. We also introduced new subscription tools, deeper analytics, and integrations with leading third-party platforms.

Digital Products.
Guides, templates, webinars, coaching — whatever you know, you can sell on beehiiv. We also made it possible to launch products in a single click, added more scheduling flexibility for coaching, and introduced powerful new webinar capabilities — all with 0% platform fees.

Paid Subscriptions.
Now the most complete subscription toolkit in the industry, full stop. We introduced group subscriptions, metered paywalls, free and paid trials, discounts and promotions, donations, and a brand-new analytics suite. Oh, and we don’t take a cent of earnings from our users.

We had several thousand people tune in live across platforms, and even more watch the event since. The press got the message loud and clear — beehiiv is the only platform you need to power your content business.

The most successful creators today are not just newsletter writers, or YouTubers, or podcasters. The most successful creators today are multi-channel and deliver value to their audience in many different ways.

Our roadmap is a bet on that reality.

For years, it meant stitching together six different tools — one for your newsletter, one for your podcast, one for your community, one for your website, etc. Today, beehiiv makes it simple for anyone to build and scale a content business without needing to sacrifice quality or settle for complexity.

While 98% of the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, of course there are cynics who want to believe that our latest release can only benefit us at the expense of our users.

And look, I get it. I think there have been a lot of platforms that have acted solely in favor of their interests and eroded the trust of many creators and publishers. But we aren’t that platform. I’ll let my rebuttal do the talking here:

I sure hope Nabeel lets me smoke whatever he has. It’s been a long four months, but I couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come.

p.s. if you missed the live event, watch it here then reply and let me know what you thought 🫡.

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/forever-summer

Shoutout Tony for the reader submission! As he describes it — “In the Wolf Rock Lighthouse, 8 miles off the Cornwall Coast.”

Looks pretty chill to me.

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

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