Startup revenue playbook

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It took just two years for us to surpass $5M ARR at beehiiv.

And while that might either sound wildly impressive or not at all depending on who you are… perhaps it’s worth mentioning that we raised just a small seed round and didn’t spend a dollar on user acquisition back then.

I want this to be the best thing you read all week, so let’s get tactical. Here are 10 actionable things we did to grow revenue in the early days, without spending a dollar…

When I started building beehiiv as a side project, I began posting more on socials and connecting with people in the industry. For me, that meant building relationships with people who were writing and scaling newsletters.

As we were nearing a beta launch, I teased what we were building and fired off this tweet:

Nearly 400 people submitted the form to join the waitlist. I also collected tons of valuable information like what platform they were using and how large their list was.

That waitlist became my hit list for the next several months. I would email each of them one by one every single week until I could get them to convert to becoming a user. I eventually converted about 25% of that list as early adopters.

A lot of founders chase clout trying to raise from Tier 1 funds. I spent my time chasing strategic angels who would actually use beehiiv and champion the platform. 

This led me to people like Scott Galloway (Prof G), Jason Yanowtiz (Blockworks), Brian Morrissey (The Rebooting), and Litquidity (Exec Sum). 

The rationale was simply about aligned incentives: we needed early users, and they were financially incentivized to help us grow. Litquidity migrated his list of over 100,000 subscribers within a month of us launching and gave us the early credibility and case study we needed to acquire other customers. The others followed suit shortly after. 

Back when I was at Morning Brew, I built the viral referral program that led to millions of new readers. Hundreds of readers would contact me every week asking for the secret sauce so they could replicate it for their own newsletter.

I eventually decided to write a detailed deep dive on exactly how it was built and operated. You could argue this was the beginning of my “build in public” journey — the article on Medium got crazy traction and feedback. 

Fast forward a few years to 2021 when my cofounders and I launched beehiiv. The industry was ridiculously crowded with dozens of established competitors, but we had something no one else had.

While Morning Brew was at the height of its success, any newsletter on beehiiv could have the exact same referral program that they did. That was a huge differentiator for us in the early days.

Today, we have a fancy security team with lots of cool infrastructure and automated workflows. In the early days, I was the security team. Every new user had to submit a form before they were allowed to use the platform… and I would manually review and approve every single one. 

The form required them to submit their social handles as part of the verification. I would connect and follow each new user who signed up and send them a quick note. 

This built a ton of goodwill towards me and the company, and helped drive early adoption. I converted them into fans, who would now see all of my posts about beehiiv in their feed (which would further spread to their network if they engaged, helping us reach even more people). A good ol’ fashioned flywheel.

This also created a direct line of communication with our early users, which helped me collect feedback, improve the product, and prevent churn.

Most of our competitors charged based on the size of their list, or the volume of emails sent each month. 

Both required users to think and calculate their costs to use the platform. 

We launched with an all-inclusive plan that gave access to all of our premium features and allowed users to send unlimited emails for just $99 /mo. 

In contrast, Mailchimp has variable pricing based on list size with tons of other limits and considerations, and would cost the same potential users more than $800 /mo.

As a new entrant in the market, you want to do whatever you can to reduce friction and get people in the door. Our simplified pricing was such a great deal relative to competitors and was so simple to communicate. 

This is admittedly a double-edged sword, because eventually we had to mature and adopt a more scalable pricing model (which was painful). But I’m a big believer in fighting to see another day: the future isn’t guaranteed and some problems are better to solve later.

When we first launched, beehiiv was so immature relative to our competitors. Users would often churn because we didn’t offer most of the features they were used to on other platforms.

Product velocity became a core competency out of necessity. We came up with a simple goal: ship one marketable feature every single week.

This is the framework we used to decide what to build:

We would do our best to ship a product update every week. This consisted of an email to all of our users recapping the updates, and a highly produced video on socials to show the world what we just launched.

Turning every product release into a moment, week after week, built the narrative that we could ship better than anyone (which was in strong contrast to our competitors whose only annual updates were to increase prices).

We made the product feel alive.

Product-led growth (PLG) is a super power.

The Hotmail story is the quintessential Silicon Valley example. The early Hotmail team added “Get your free email at Hotmail” in the footer of every email, which led to crazy viral growth.

Our iteration: the footer of every email and website has a “Powered by beehiiv” badge that links to our homepage. As we grew, that resulted in exponentially more readers seeing that their favorite newsletters were built on beehiiv, which drove tens of thousands of additional signups.

We try to factor virality into everything we build. The dashboard is extremely shareable and features our signature pink. When people share their progress on socials it’s obvious that they are building on beehiiv.

We later launched badges, milestones, and recaps.

Our entire team is ridiculously active on socials, which is an absolute cheat code.

It allows us to amplify marketing, engage with our users, and “build characters” that outsiders can follow. In a world where functionality is commoditized, people want to follow people, stories, and narratives.

We built a culture that encourages employees to promote company initiatives on their own channels and engage with our users. We even created a dedicated Slack channel where employees share posts that we should engage with.

“Everyone” isn’t just employees though, it’s users too. Rather than us telling the world how great we are, we let our users do that for us and we amplify their message (which leads to more users doing the same).

And of course, I have been “building in public” from day one; I share company milestones, releases, tactics, and everything in-between. That builds trust with our users, and also helps grow my accounts… which leads to more people seeing these company updates and launches ♻.

Of all of the social platforms, LinkedIn by far drives the most ROI for me.

In the early days, I would go through every single person who engaged with my content and shoot them a message about signing up to beehiiv. Obviously they weren’t all great leads, but some of that outreach converted into large enterprise deals.

LinkedIn also allows you to export those interactions. When we hired our first seller, I would export the interactions on all of my posts and give them to him to do the outreach. The response rates were crazy high because these were people who were already familiar with me and beehiiv.

One of my best pieces of advice for any founder is to send a monthly investor update… even if you don’t have any investors.

I have sent one every single month from day one, to a list of a few hundred investors, employees, colleagues, friends, and family. In a nutshell, these updates:

It’s also a cheat code to stay in touch and impress potential investors without having to waste time “catching up for coffee.” We raised our $12.5M Series A in less than a week thanks to this.

If you want inspiration → you can signup for free to receive every investor update I’ve ever written for beehiiv.

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