Subway surfing

You are what you consume. As a startup founder I spend a ton of time reading and listening to podcasts about other successful entrepreneurs.

That’s why I think I was legitimately the first person to register for Vanta’s upcoming Zero To Success live event. I got a sneak peek and think it’ll be a must for any founder to attend.

The lineup…

• Shaan Puri: Sold his company to Twitch and is the Founder of the My First Million podcast

• Travis Good: Co-founder and CEO of Workstreet

• Chase Lee: Founder and CEO of Trustpage (acquired by Vanta)

They’ll unpack the early missteps, tough calls, and tactical lessons that helped get them from zero to success… in an epic live event.

If you read Big Desk Energy, you’ll love this event. Register for free below – there are limited spots available.

We just bought a shit ton of ads and plastered the New York City subway.

But that’s not all. We also sponsored a couple dozen podcasts, newsletters, creators, and events.

Hell, we even did an April Fool’s Day collaboration with Morning Brew where Dan Toomey did a hostile takeover of beehiiv and replaced me as CEO.

That racked up over 125,000 impressions across platforms and lots of laughs.

Is there a method to the madness or are we just aimlessly lighting money on fire? Yes.

During our first year in business we didn’t spend a dollar on acquisition. Rather than becoming overly dependent on paid acquisition to grow, we invested our time and effort into product led growth. (We also didn’t really have any money to spend).

It worked. We operated super lean and really optimized our funnels and user experience.

In our second year, we grew more confident in our ability to convert and retain users, so we finally opened up our wallet to dabble in some performance marketing. You know — the usual direct response ads across search, display, and social.

Performance marketing has since made up the majority of our acquisition budget.

Mostly because I had never been super interested in experimenting with true brand marketing. It never felt like an efficient use of the limited capital we had, and I never thought that the product was ready for the limelight.

Our old website builder was pretty limiting, we didn’t have easy-to-use templates, our automations were mediocre, yada yada. What was the point of spending a ton of money to get people’s attention if (in my opinion) the platform wasn’t capable of delivering a 10/10 experience?

But after 3 years of relentlessly building, it finally felt like we had reached an inflection point. We had achieved feature parity with nearly every incumbent platform in the industry, and had expanded the platform to serve a much wider addressable market.

With all of the momentum and an absolutely loaded Q1 roadmap on the books, I called my shot back at our first all hands of the year.

The plan: 10 weeks of aggressively shipping features to address any remaining shortcomings in the platform… followed by our first ever brand awareness campaign.

The goal: Introduce beehiiv to the world on a much broader scale.

And aggressively ship we did. We launched our new website builder, which changed the entire paradigm of what’s possible on beehiiv. Suddenly users could build beautiful custom websites, create splash pages, lead magnets, multiple landing pages, etc. all natively within the platform.

We launched email and website templates, Direct Sponsorships, an App Marketplace, native integrations, send API, cohort analysis, shortcuts, merge tags, etc.

We executed a near flawless Q1, which I outlined in last week’s newsletter. Then a few weeks ago right on queue we began recklessly spending money launching a handful of strategic marketing campaigns.

The theme of the campaign: the one place to build.

I was going to spell it out in more detail, but I think the name sorta says it all. Instead I’ll share some of the brand assets we created for it…

In my opinion, if you’re going to commit, you need to commit all the way. Brand awareness only really works if you can actually capture people’s attention and make them aware.

That requires a higher frequency of impressions, ideally within a shorter period of time. If I could dream up an ideal day (for us) of someone in our target demographic:

1. On their way to work they hear a beehiiv ad read on their favorite podcast.

2. They hop on a train and see beehiiv ads plastered all along the subway car.

3. They open their emails and see beehiiv sponsoring a handful of their favorite newsletters.

4. They watch a YouTube video and receive a beehiiv direct response ad.

If you are within our ICP (ideal customer profile), our goal is to be absolutely everywhere all at once. That’s how to maximize brand awareness.

Well, is it working?

Qualitatively: yes.

Quantitatively: also yes.

Three of our largest signup days in company history have all occurred within the past two weeks. Last week was also the best revenue week in company history — we added $30K of net MRR.

In addition to the subway ads and sponsorships, we also ramped up our regular paid spend across all of our channels, hosted a handful of events and webinars, and encouraged employees to elevate their social presence. Again, the purpose is to be everywhere all at once with this marketing push.

Last week we hosted a Local Newsletter Summit with nearly 1,000 attendees, then launched a Local Newsletter Accelerator program with plenty of perks (you can apply here for free).

After being heads down building for the past ~8 months, I came up for air and said yes to all the podcast opportunities I had previously blown off. The goal was to flood the zone with as much content as possible and maximize the exposure of the company (if you have a large podcast hit me up).

Totally unplanned and coincidental, Digiday dropped a piece on publishers abandoning Substack—a closed social platform that takes 10% of paid subscription revenue—for beehiiv, an open platform empowering creators of all sizes to grow, monetize, and own their audience relationships.

More content, more distribution, more events, more impressions, more smelly subways.

All of this is happening while our engineering team continues to relentlessly ship feature after feature to improve the platform. Speaking of, we have another massive feature drop set to launch any day now…

All aboard the L train — no sleep til Brooklyn.

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/subway-surfing

I call this Bali on a Budget. But actually this office is super chill.

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Turn on, tune in, drop out. Click on any of the tracks below to get in a groove — each selected from the full Big Desk Energy playlist.

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

• I joined Greg Isenberg and shared the most complete breakdown I’ve ever given on my newsletter growth strategies (YouTube)

• Meta announced MoCha, a new model to turn text or voice into super realistic talking characters (Angry Tom)

• The latest Founders podcast covering Ken Griffin was great (Founders)

• When OpenAI Ghiblifies the world (Pirate Wires)

• I loved Tobi’s memo on AI 👇️ 

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