Unconventional thinking

Ploy is the product I wish existed when we started beehiiv.

It’s a marketing platform that turns your website into your company's growth engine, and the founding CTO of Webflow is the one behind it. He spent 12 years watching people ship beautiful sites that just sat there.

But on Ploy, your website works harder so you don’t have to.

Here’s a normal night on Ploy:

Hex runs enterprise ABM on it. Clay is customizing landing pages at scale.

So why is your site still just sitting there?

There’s nothing conventional about building a startup.

In the beginning, you’re usually a few people dumb enough to think you can just will something into existence… and compete with companies who have considerably more money, employees, resources, awareness, experience, etc.

Translation: it’s hard as shit.

But that’s also why I absolutely love startups — it forces you to think and approach things differently in order to compete.

There are so many things we do at beehiiv that others may consider unconventional:

…and so many more. But today I wanted to share an unconventional solution we came up with in the early days to help us scale quicker and never compromise on talent density.

Nearly nine months after we launched, in August 2022, we were a small team of about eight.

A few months earlier we tragically lost our friend and CTO, Andrew Platkin, and despite all of the turmoil, we were beginning to come out on the other side of that (a story for a different time).

We were looking to bring on a new CTO and were in late stage conversations with Noah Pryor. He was previously the first hire at Teachable and scaled the engineering team to over 85 people as their CTO.

I was also in desperate need of a Chief of Staff to help operationalize the business alongside me.

I had been speaking with Preeya Goenka, who was our former CSM at Sailthru back when I was working at Morning Brew, and knew that she’d be a perfect fit for the role.

But at the time (in August 2022), she had just recently left Sailthru and was now a VP at a no-code AI startup that had raised over $28M.

Good news: we were talking to two incredibly talented candidates we liked a lot.

Bad news: we were a tiny eight person company that raised a modest seed round, and couldn’t possibly afford these hires.

We probably had $1.75M in our bank account and were earning about $25,000 in revenue per month.

If we had simply matched both of their previous salaries (let alone give them a better offer) their salaries combined would have been ~40% of our bank account.

So conventional thinking would leave you with two options:

Both options kind of blow to be honest. You don’t build an A+ company by hiring B+ talent. But you also can’t put the company at financial risk (nor did I want to exacerbate my already sky-high stress levels).

Despite being early, we had clearly found some level of product-market fit and revenues were predictably scaling ~25% MoM. Here’s a screenshot of our revenues from Stripe dating May 2022 to December 2022.

August is the fourth one over from the left at a modest $24,634.

So I went back to both Noah and Preeya with a proposal:

This proposal perfectly aligned incentives for everyone. We all wanted to execute and grow the business, resulting in more revenue. When we hit those revenue milestones, we’d have more available capital to more comfortably compensate them.

It was also a really incredible stress test to vet their belief in the team and our vision. Accepting this proposal meant they truly believed in me and what we were building, and were confident we would in fact hit those milestones… even if it cost them a bit of cash up front.

Fast forward to today and not only did we absolutely crush those milestones…

Business school and conventional thinking doesn’t tell you to do this. It takes a little creativity, some gut instincts, mixed with some storytelling and persuasion.

But we got our people without putting the company at risk.

I spent the holiday weekend on a little surf trip in Todos Santos. Here’s a little home office inspired by the vibes there.

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

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

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