Sunshining

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Back in March we dropped one of the more anticipated product launches of the year, and it was a total disaster.

While that definitely wasn’t the plan, I learned a whole lot from the experience and the company today is ultimately better off because of it.

The “I fucked up, don’t do what I did” posts always seem to resonate the most, so here I am doing my civic duty. I’ll share the full backstory and my biggest takeaways so you can avoid making similar mistakes.

I’ll start with some context…

beehiiv is home to tens of thousands of the top newsletters in the world. We offer users the ability to create beautiful websites and newsletters, and equip them with a full suite of growth and monetization tools.

But we had one hard constraint in the platform that was causing issues for more advanced users: you could only have a single design for your newsletter.

If you wanted a header image with your logo, a grey background, black text, and blue links (hey that sounds like Big Desk Energy) … well, you would design that once and each email you send on beehiiv would look like that.

But if you wanted to send an email with a black background, all of your emails would now have a black background (i.e. there was just a single global design). Or if you wanted to launch a special weekend edition with a different style and aesthetic: impossible.

To make matters worse, we created an isolated and cumbersome design experience, dubbed the “Design Lab,” where you would go to make these updates. You’d have to leave the post you were working on to make design updates, then return back to your work after.

We made the assumption when we initially built beehiiv that each newsletter would only ever have a single consistent design. And while that was true for most users, more and more advanced users were growing frustrated with the limitations.

We kicked off the year making this a top priority. The writing experience is arguably the most important workflow in the platform; ensuring it was seamless, flexible, and enjoyable was critical.

We built this beautiful new experience where users could toggle between writing mode (i.e. focused) and design mode (i.e. to update styles) right in the editor. Design updates would only impact that particular post, and users could save the changes as new templates to reuse again in the future.

Those templates would now be available to browse and reuse in the brand new template library. We also launched a handful of professionally designed quick-start templates for our users to leverage.

Lastly, we added net new design capabilities to support even more granular control and creativity. beehiiv is home to some of the most beautiful newsletters you’ll find in your inbox, and we added even more flexibility.

All in all, this initiative was supposed to be a home run. It removed all of the previous limitations of the platform and provided a much more refined experience. After a few weeks of QA we flipped the switch to launch it on March 27th.

We expected to take a victory lap for nailing yet another big launch; instead, it broke everything.

Hundreds of users who were actively in the editor lost their work, and thousands of templates that had been consistent for months suddenly had all sorts of problems.

There were fonts and things that weren’t displaying properly, spacing that suddenly looked different, and a ton of overall confusion regarding the changes.

It turns out that a few weeks of internal QA and a handful of beta users couldn’t have possibly accounted for the millions of unique design permutations available in the platform. We have over 30,000 active publishers, each with their own unique design and custom elements.

Scaling a company is fun and all, until you fuck up. Having thousands of angry users write in to support with issue after issue isn’t the most fun way to spend your days.

This was a good ol’ fashioned fire drill. We had all hands on deck fielding issues and squashing bugs for an entire week. Then we spent another few weeks working through every unique edge case and inconsistency.

After the dust settled, we were finally able to action all of the great user feedback we received to refine the experience even more, albeit a few weeks later than I had anticipated.

Today we’re a few months removed from the episode, and the in-app experience is finally what we had always expected it to be. We’ll continue to add more templates and even build a vibrant marketplace for users to buy and sell templates (soon).

The data tells a really promising story too — 75% of new users now use the quick-start templates to create new posts (which didn’t exist previously). Overall it’s a huge win for improved user experience and onboarding.

At beehiiv, we do this thing called “sunshining” where we own and communicate our mistakes publicly to prevent others from making them again. Here are some of my biggest takeaways from the experience:

While all of these seem super obvious in retrospect, it’s not always so black-and-white. Prior to the release, there were dozens of high-value customers pressing us to get this to market.

I still believe that speed is a massive competitive advantage; showing urgency to solve your customer’s problems is a good thing. But as they say, everything in moderation.

We built quite a bit of scar tissue from this launch.

We immediately doubled our QA bandwidth, established a more thorough beta process, began over-communicating upcoming changes to users, and overall slowed the pace just a tad to really emphasize quality launches.

beehiiv shipping 15% slower will still out-ship nearly every other company… and will result in better products, better user experiences, less support tickets, and less grey hairs (for me at least).

Speaking of shipping, we just shipped these beautiful custom subscribe forms yesterday, some new AI tools, and a whole lot more → check it out.

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/sunshining

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