Hacker House, Mexico

Your startup’s biggest vulnerability isn’t your product. It’s your inbox.

Think about what’s sitting in there right now: investor updates, cap tables, customer data. One phishing email or one reused password, and all of it walks out the door.

Founders are easy targets. We move fast, juggle 15 logins, and connect to whatever Wi-Fi the café or airport throws at us (guilty). Hackers know this.

Surfshark One puts the security stack you should already have into one app:

This Black Friday, Surfshark One (which bundles all of the above) costs the same as their Starter plan: just $2.49/mo on the 2-year plan. Plus, you’ll get 3 months extra.

You already protect your runway. Protect your data the same way.

One of the bizarre realities of building a remote company: I’ve talked to my cofounders nearly every day for the past five years, but we’ve only hung out in person a handful of times.

We all worked together in New York during our Morning Brew days. When we started building beehiiv as a side project, we’d hunker down on weekends at one of our apartments and grind it out. Here’s a little throwback to those days:

No users, no revenue, no idea what the hell we were doing. Just me and two guys dumb enough to fall for my pitch that we could actually build something of value.

Fast forward to that fall: I moved to Los Angeles, Ben moved back to South Carolina, and Jake moved back to Texas. Since then, the only times we’ve hung out have been during our annual company offsites. That, and the one time they flew out to LA for a photoshoot before we announced our Series A.

We were way overdue to change that. So this past week, the three of us set up a little hacker house in Mexico City. Working past midnight is a whole lot more fun (and motivating) when your cofounders are sitting right next to you.

It felt just like the early days. We’d post up in the Airbnb and grind for hours, escape each night for some of the most incredible food on the planet, then head back for a nightcap.

It was my sixth time in Mexico City, and every visit I have to fight the masculine gringo urge to buy an apartment on Avenida Ámsterdam and make it a long-term home base. That place is magical.

Anyway, the trip couldn’t have come at a better time. Ben and Jake are each leading one of our two biggest bets at beehiiv, both set to launch early Q1. They’re building the future, and I’m perfecting the present.

We have massive ambitions at beehiiv. It’s not obvious from the outside looking in, but we’re still in the first inning of what this platform is capable of. Most of the pieces are very much still coming together.

Outsiders will doubt you every step of the way. When I first pitched beehiiv to investors in 2021, more than 40 of them passed and said it would never work. But we kept our conviction, put our heads down, believed in each other, and kept executing.

2022: $376K
2023: $5M
2024: $15M
2025: $27M
2026: ~$50M

And we’re going to make a real run at $90M next year 😏.

Chop wood, carry water.

One of the hardest parts of building beehiiv is balancing how many bets we’re making at once. It’s also the most fun — we’re taking multiple home run swings at the same time.

Our first bet was building the best newsletter platform in the industry. At Morning Brew, my cofounders and I built everything from the CMS to the referral program to the ad platform. That machine helped scale the company to a $75M exit in 2020.

The original thesis for beehiiv: everyone should have access to the same enterprise-grade tools Morning Brew had.

That included monetization, a world-class sales team bringing in premium sponsors (like Lovable, Alaska Airlines, Nike, etc.), and a network of quality publishers to accelerate growth.

Check, check, and check. Today, any creator on beehiiv gets capabilities that used to be locked behind expensive enterprise platforms. We pay creators more than $1M every month through the beehiiv Ad Network, and the Recommendation Network has driven more than 20M new subscriptions for newsletters on the platform.

And we’re just getting started.

Newsletters and email are at the core of everything we do. There’s never been a more important time to own your audience and distribution… and email is the best channel for it.

But it’s increasingly rare for creators to only write a newsletter, or only post on TikTok, or only host a podcast. The most successful creators and businesses are going multi-channel, and more of them are turning to beehiiv as the central place to run and scale all of it.

Which brings me to one of our latest bets: podcasts.

The status quo for creators with a newsletter and a podcast is a mess: multiple platforms, multiple bills, multiple workflows, and audience data that never talks to each other.

So in April, we launched podcasts on beehiiv to change that. Users could host, distribute, and monetize their show in the same place as their newsletter, with one unified subscription across both, automatic email alerts when a new episode drops, and SEO/AEO-optimized pages for every single episode.

Thousands of notable podcasters have since brought their shows over, driving millions of downloads every month. But there was one thing missing that we kept hearing over and over again: “hosting is table stakes… what podcasters actually want is to get paid.”

So today, we’re introducing podcast ads. It’s the most feature-rich launch in beehiiv history.

Here’s what it looks like if you’re a podcaster on beehiiv:

You can bulk-add pre-roll and post-roll ads to every episode in your catalog in just a few clicks. That means your entire back catalog starts earning on the very next play.

For mid-roll ads, you can open up this sleek-ass UI and mark where you want ads to go. Every time someone hits play, beehiiv drops in a fresh ad, so you can swap sponsors or move breaks anytime without re-uploading anything.

If you sell your own sponsorships, drop them into the campaign manager, set the flight dates, and pick which shows and placements they run on. You can target by device and listener location, and even set frequency caps. Those are the only caps in this launch (no cap).

If you don’t have a sponsor yet, flip on programmatic ads and beehiiv fills your open breaks with marketplace advertisers. There’s no minimum download requirement, so you can start earning from episode one (I’ve been told that’s a huge deal). And if you do have sponsors, programmatic fills the breaks you don’t sell, so no spot goes empty.

Every campaign gets its own dashboard, so you know exactly what it earned and can show sponsors exactly what they got.

And for the podcast nerds reading this: our metrics are IAB certified, you can import your show from other platforms in just a few steps (ad breaks included), and every episode automatically pushes to Apple, Spotify, Overcast, and every other major app.

We clearly aren’t tiptoeing into the podcast space. This launch puts beehiiv on par with the most advanced podcast platforms out there, and that’s comparing us head to head on podcast features alone.

But beehiiv isn’t just a podcast platform. We also have the most sophisticated (and affordable) newsletter platform in the industry, and it’s not particularly close. For creators with both a newsletter and a podcast, we’ve built what some in the business call “a no-brainer.”

And while podcasts on beehiiv are just kicking into high gear, don’t think for a second we’re taking our foot off the gas on newsletters. Here’s a thread of 22+ updates (and counting) we’ve shipped to the newsletter platform in just the past week:

Oh, and those two massive bets Ben and Jake are leading? Both are email-focused. I’ll leave it at that.

Mic. drop.

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Shoutout to Tamara for the reader submission 🫡

Inspired by her hotel room in Japan and man… I’d love to generate some shareholder value from there. So zen.

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