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It was all a dream

It was all a dream

It's been a crazy start to 2025.

Tyler Denk
January 28, 2025

FOUNDERS BEWARE: You might be wasting unnecessary money on Docusign, HelloSign, or Adobe.

At beehiiv, we were spending hundreds of dollars per month to simply send and receive signed documents. Then I found Agree.com.

Agree made e-signature free for everyone… and then loaded the platform with killer features like automated invoicing, integrated payments, and revenue recovery.

Personally, for me it’s a toss up between their simple UI and how easy they make it to track and manage payments.

I already know you’re smart because you read Big Desk Energy. Now you can show others that you’re smart because you send contracts with Agree.

It’s been a crazy start to 2025.

We’re on pace to add $1M of ARR on the month and really starting to fire on all cylinders. It’s just feature after feature, initiative after initiative, hire after hire.

I can’t recall a time where I’ve been so busy and sleep deprived.

Last week we launched our brand new website builder (internally dubbed the “dream builder”). It’s remarkably flexible and now allows our users to build beautiful professional websites, all with no code.

That was the culmination of seven long months of work after acquiring Typedream last summer.

This week I was going to share the backstory of the acquisition, the launch strategy, and some of the great stories in between… but that will have to wait.

Last Wednesday I woke up before my alarm after just 4 hours of sleep. We were a few hours away from launching the new website builder and I was in this exhausted delirious state; overcome with both excitement and gratitude. I grabbed my phone, opened my notes app, and just began writing an email that I would later send to the team.

Here’s the email I sent…

This was too long of a kudos to give in Slack, and too good of a story not to tell… so here we are.

I was first introduced to Kevin last May when he floated the idea of Typedream joining beehiiv. Statistically most acquisitions fail — they’re often messy and complicated.. and involve merging different cultures and tech and users in ways that don’t often work out as anticipated.

Prior to finalizing the acquisition, we agreed it wouldn’t make sense to just fold Typedream into beehiiv… rather an entire rewrite and rebuild of the website builder would be required (from zilch). Transparently, we structured the deal where the Typedream team would receive most of the upside from the sale after we launched this new website builder. Given the difficult approach we agreed on (a full re-write), that was a real risk for them to take. Like I said — most acquisitions fail.

But Kevin, Albert, and Putri bought in and trusted us, despite only getting to know us over the course of 3-4 diligence calls (it was a pretty quick acquisition process).

They not only assimilated to our culture, but meaningfully added to it. They brought lots of incredible insights and quirks that makes our engineering team today considerably better than it was before. In agreeing to the rebuild they also agreed to learn a completely new framework and tech stack to build in our environment… and did so without ever complaining (mostly 😝).

The first of the kudos goes to them. They’re a remarkably talented team who took a ton of risk and showed a ton of patience to get to where we are today.

The second kudos goes to Manpreet, Jeet, and Killiman who have spent the past 2+ months working alongside the dream team, accelerating the pace of progress, and becoming an invaluable part of the project. Their efforts converted this overly ambitious 12-month project into a 7-month project. Each of them also contributed while regularly being pulled off to work on other initiatives … and balanced it without a single complaint.

Third round of kudos goes to the handful of people who all came and contributed meaningfully along the way. In reality, none of these people were slated to work on the project much at all. Rather, they identified an opportunity to help and went out of their way to take on additional work and responsibilities to ensure this was success.

Shreya and Steven who have been diligently QA’ing and building beautiful templates for the past month.
Sisi who came in to help design and QA the different templates on multiple occasions.
Tina who has been working to bridge the gap between product and support, and pushed us to think more thoughtfully about everything.
Tim, Viktor, Ja, Corwin, and Elden who led some early QA efforts and POCs.
[REDACTED] (who’s not reading this) probably contributed over 40 hours in the past 2 weeks to help get this across the finish line.

Fourth kudos goes to Mike. You’d be hard pressed to find a more flawless example of leadership, patience, and execution. In addition to pushing 100s of PRs himself — he woke up every day these past 7 months with a clearly communicated game plan for each and every person on the team … then ended the day with a thorough recap + prepped the European team on what to prioritize overnight. He was a god damn engine. Him and I have been up working past 10pm for the past 3 weeks pushing to get this live, and worked this entire past 4-day weekend to have this launch ready.

Lastly, it’s hard to overstate just how much of a team effort this was. What transpired yesterday (the day before launch) I think perfectly exemplifies what makes the culture at beehiiv so special:

Sisi impromptu asked the team if there’s anything she can help with for launch (despite having a handful of other critical projects to work on). The answer was a hard yes — and she spent her entire day QA’ing templates with Shreya.
We found a p0 security bug in the 11th hour and pulled in Parris and Killiman who spent most of their day resolving.
After finishing writing the product update, I handed it off to Tony for revisions and then to Karen for final edits. Laura who has 5092 other priorities created a masterpiece of a thumbnail image, and then Steven created a handful of gifs for the update (while also QA'ing)
At 6pm we realized we overlooked having the proper paywall / upsell logic in the app — and I tapped OJ to build that at the last minute.
Shreya, Kevin, Albert, Putri, Mike, Steven and I were all frivolously finding and squashing bugs well past midnight. Steven enjoyed an 11pm coffee and finished the tutorial video for the product update at 4am (!!).
Manpreet and Jeet collectively cleared about a dozen tickets overnight to get this across the finish line.

😮‍💨😮‍💨😮‍💨

So where are we now?

The website builder is both miraculously awesome, flexible, and powerful — and still very flawed and rough around the edges. I think that’s what a beta is supposed to be.

And while it is easy for users to complain and point out what’s missing or not working (of which we’ll swiftly address) … that’s the short-term price we pay to more quickly gather feedback and build something truly differentiated and special.

I anticipate the next few weeks will be very taxing on the team — from engineering to support to product to solutions to sales and everything in between. But the road to becoming a multi-billion dollar company goes through the website builder (and the future iterations and extensions of it we plan to deliver over the next few quarters).

Day one mentality right now → this is actually just the very beginning 🙏🏽💪🏽

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Credit: Taylor Diem

My home office just a mere few months after DeepSeek launches. Thank you China.

Shoutout Taylor for the reader submission 🫡.

Think you can generate a better office? Reply with your submissions 📨.

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