Top 4 Talk

As a founder, you’re busy shipping new features, raising capital, and closing deals.

And with AI accelerating how quickly startups are growing, security expectations are higher earlier than ever. Getting the proper security and compliance can unlock massive growth… or stall it if you wait too long.

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Vanta is built for speed, and can have your company audit-ready in weeks, not months. Join Vanta's Live Demo on July 10 to see the product in action and ask your questions in real time (I’ll be there too).

You gotta love when a summer holiday lands on a Friday. We ended up giving everyone off on Thursday too because we care about our employees.

I spent the 4-day weekend down in Baja California rotating between surfing, reading, sleeping, and eating tacos. I crushed two books (not to brag), and left the weekend a little better at surfing than when I started. That’s all you can really ask for.

Anyway this newsletter isn’t about me, it’s about you. Specifically you if you’re already a beehiiv user (which, why wouldn’t you be)?

Last week we relaunched our Recommendations feature (i.e. newsletters organically recommending other newsletters) and in the 7 days since, it’s been an absolute rocket ship.

Here’s the backstory.

Back in my Morning Brew days we discovered what would seem like a fairly obvious insight: newsletters were one of the best acquisition sources for finding other engaged readers. That’s almost like saying the best place to find a fish is in the sea, but for whatever reason it was mostly overlooked.

We partnered with a handful of similarly-sized newsletters and would have them recommend Morning Brew as a callout in their newsletter, and we would do the same in return. This was the earliest form of the newsletter recommendation strategy that we deployed.

We didn’t spend a dollar on acquisition for the first year I was at Morning Brew. Instead we optimized the hell out of organic channels like the referral program, SEO, and recommendations. That alone transformed us from small upstart newsletter to nearly 500,000 readers.

If that playbook sounds familiar, it’s because at beehiiv we prioritized building these capabilities natively into the platform as early as possible.

Just one month after launching the company, we released a referral program feature, mirrored after Morning Brew’s, for anyone to take advantage of.

And take advantage they did. Milk Road started from zilch in January 2022 and quickly scaled to 250,000 subscribers and a 7-figure acquisition in just 10 months. Their referral program alone drove more than 25,000 new readers to subscribe.

Last week I wrote about the capabilities of our new website builder. beehiiv offers users SEO-optimized websites right out of the box. Our engineering team has put in the time and effort to ensure the content our users create is optimized to be picked up by search engines, and more recently even LLMs.

We also built a native recommendation network way back in 2022. It allows newsletters in the network to recommend each other, helping everyone grow faster.

Since then, the beehiiv Recommendation Network has grown to over 30K newsletters and has led to several million new subscribers 🤯.

And while that sounds all great and groovy, admittedly, we hadn’t prioritized building new features and capabilities for it in quite some time. Meanwhile, users have been more vocally expressing their desire to promote their favorite content and accelerate their growth via these network effects.

So a few months back we decided to reprioritize it and make it one of the most powerful features in the platform.

Somewhere along the way, we took inspiration from the MySpace Top 8 (if you’re old enough to remember that). I fell in love with the idea, but 8 was too many. Recommendations are shown after a new reader subscribes to a newsletter, and no one intentionally signs up for 8 additional newsletters.

…that is, despite other platforms leveraging dark patterns to trick readers into thinking they need to.

Neither here nor there. At beehiiv, we value quality over quantity and don’t need to leverage malicious dark patterns to prove the value of our platform. Plus, we crunched the numbers and validated the impact of genuine recommendations vs those coming said platforms.

Anyway, because 8 was too many, we landed on the beehiiv Top 4.

Internally it was hotly debated. There were a subset of users who had a lot more than 4 recommendations, and the data showed that the more recommendations a publisher had, the more new subscriptions they would drive.

Which is a bit obvious; that’s like saying people who owned more t-shirts would wear more t-shirts.

But intuition told me that restricting users to just 4 recommendations would actually yield far greater results, despite the data saying otherwise. Here’s why:

I had enough conviction in the above and was willing to be proven wrong if the data went sideways after the launch. Type 2 decisions always allow you to change your mind later.

Last Monday we launched the new feature alongside a retro Myspace-ish video. The beehiiv Recommendation Network has grown like a weed since, despite the long holiday weekend.

I posted that I had an extra spot in my Top 4 on socials and received over 100 replies, 15 emails, and 10 texts from people vying to take it.

As for my prediction re simplicity and scarcity — it’s working. There have been hundreds of posts and mentions across socials of people looking for others to team up and complete their Top 4.

Francis, the editor of Creator Spotlight told me that more than a dozen newsletters on Substack reached out to get added to his Top 4. Come on over, the water’s warm 🏊‍♂.

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/top-4-talk

The best virtual event of the summer is happening next Wednesday (and it’s 100% free).

It recently occurred to me: not enough people have a safari outside of their home office. We should change that.

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

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…

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