Now hiring

True story: Back when I worked at Morning Brew, I helped launch our college ambassador program. The results were incredible but sourcing and managing thousands of students was a full-time job.

Now, Home From College makes it simple. It’s become our secret weapon for reaching Gen Z – and it can be yours too. Here’s how:

Brands like Uber, Etsy, and Poppi already rely on Home From College to grow. Thousands more use it for creators, interns, and campus launches.

My favorite part? Experimenting is easy. My second favorite? Getting started takes less than 60 seconds.

Simple math: real Gen Z voices → more credibility → faster growth.

We’re hiring a VP of Growth to take beehiiv from $22M ARR to $100M+.

I am admittedly a bit biased, but I legitimately think it’s one of the best roles a growth leader could ask for.

Why?

There are so many difficult things required to build a successful company, and fortunately (for us) beehiiv actually does so many of the hard things exceptionally well.

The product is excellent, our engineering talent density is like osmium (3x denser than iron), and our product velocity is legitimately best-in-class. We are operating in an absolutely massive market, with opportunities for expansion everywhere you look. And we have a recognizable brand with a cult-like following.

Now we just need to take this foundation and efficiently get our product in front of the millions of creators, publishers, and brands who would benefit from it. We need an experienced growth leader who can guide this rocket ship in the right direction.

Today, the business is operating at a $33M revenue run rate. Here’s how we got here…

Back in 2021, we were riding the credibility high of the Morning Brew acquisition and teasing that we were going to launch a new platform to “democratize those types of outcomes for other newsletters.”

Then we made one of the most common founder mistakes: underpricing our product.

We launched with an extremely generous free plan (still exists today) and a $99 paid plan that allowed users to send unlimited emails up to 100,000 subscribers. For context, Mailchimp’s plans start at $1,025 /mo for the same number of contacts.

The silver lining of being grossly underpriced was that it allowed us to quickly scale users because we had removed price from ever really being a reason for objection.

This was back when you could actually drive traffic and engagement on Twitter, and my “build in public” approach to building the business drove consistent top of funnel to the platform. We got tons of early adopters to use the product and fall in love with it.

Taking a page from the Hotmail playbook, we added a simple “Powered by beehiiv” badge in the footer of all emails and websites to drive traffic back to our site (you can now remove this by upgrading to one of our paid plans).

In those early days, the playbook was simple: launch new features, promote them on social, and elevate users who were having success on the platform. That along with our product-led growth initiatives was enough to get lift off without spending a dollar on paid acquisition.

We then began to invest in a few long-term growth initiatives that we knew would eventually compound and bear fruit: SEO, Partner Program, and organic social.

We launched our own in-house content operation, leveraging our own website infrastructure, and transformed our blog into a well-oiled machine. Today, we receive nearly 5M monthly search impressions to our blog, tens of thousands of clicks, and thousands of completely organic signups.

The beehiiv Partner Program is now one of the most generous affiliate programs on the internet. We pay up to 60% commission for each referred user, and send the top performing partner each quarter on an all-expenses paid trip as part of the beehiiv Beach Club promotion. The Partner Program now accounts for about 15% of our new monthly MRR.

Our social strategy has transformed from retweeting my personal posts to an actual playbook with tentpole initiatives and tons of experimentation. Today, our social accounts tally 130,000 followers and millions of organic impressions.

Fast forward to about a year after launching the company, and we began to explore paid acquisition on popular digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google. We built tons of custom funnels and drove traffic en masse to bespoke landing pages.

That unlocked another level of growth for us.

As our paid acquisition efforts matured, we began to experiment with newsletter sponsorships, podcasts, videos, and events. We tested new sorts of lead magnets, quizzes, and webinars, and hosted virtual online events like our Creator Business Summit earlier this summer.

We also have access to some proprietary inventory like our owned and operated beehiiv Ad Network, which is home to 30K+ active newsletters… and growing.

Overall, growth has been solid. From launch to $22M ARR in under 4 years, there’s certainly a lot to be proud of.

But we’re also at a very interesting inflection point as a business.

Our “Enterprise” business didn’t exist a few years ago, and today accounts for nearly a quarter of our revenue. We can serve large publishers and brands better than the antiquated platforms that have been overcharging them for decades.

Since bringing on a VP of Sales earlier this year, we have closed logos like TIME, Kalshi, TechCrunch, The Ringer, and dozens of others.

Meanwhile on the self-serve front, the product and ICP are evolving. We used to be a simple platform to send your newsletter, but now offer so much more.

Our Website Builder is rapidly becoming more competitive with each passing week. I fully believe that beehiiv can compete head-to-head with Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, Framer, Webflow, Loveable, etc. in the not-so-distant future.

The creator economy empowered individuals to build subscription businesses on platforms like Patreon, Substack, and Memberful. beehiiv now offers the most competitive suite of tools for converting your audience into subscription revenue… and is the only one of those companies that doesn’t take a cut of revenue from its users.

And the beehiiv Ad Network today is driving revenue for tens of thousands of users and conversions for hundreds of notable brands. We’ve launched nearly $3M worth of campaigns so far in Q3 alone, and our largest product bets are still ahead of us.

All of that’s to say, beehiiv is truly in a prime position to be the platform creators and brands leverage to turn audience attention into sustainable revenue. I think we can become the preeminent platform of the creator economy, and so much more.

But what got us from zero to $22M ARR isn’t going to be what takes us to $100M and beyond.

As I wrote about last week, Ben Horowitz describes the CEO as having managerial leverage when the department leads are entirely calling the shots and pushing the company forward. If I had the skills and experience to lead the growth team, I’d just do it myself.

But we’re looking for someone who runs laps around my growth experience. Someone who has built a growth and marketing engine for a hypergrowth SaaS business before. Someone who wants to add “took beehiiv from Series B to IPO” to their resume.

If that person is you (or someone you know)… smash that reply button.

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/now-hiring

Shoutout Michael for the reader submission.

I’m probably a bit too claustrophobic to have my office be encapsulated in a bubble on top of Niagara Falls… but A+ for creativity.

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