Vulnerable

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I don’t really give a shit what people think of me.

I’ve learned how to untangle my ego from the company and the product. And that’s become a real cheat code for being a better founder.

Ultimately my goal is simple: build the best, most delightful product so that our users can succeed. There’s a few ways to go about that, and I believe the most effective way is to get feedback straight from the source.

We’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

The easy version of this is simply listening to what users are asking for. For almost a year, users repeatedly asked us to build a community platform so they could deepen the relationship with their audience and offer additional value.

So we prioritized it and shipped it a few weeks ago at the beehiiv Summer Release Event. Adoption has been pretty nuts out of the gate — hundreds of communities are already up and running in just the past week, with tens of thousands of members globally.

Shipping what people ask for is the easy half of listening. The harder half is asking them what you’re getting wrong. So I did.

I posted this on both X and LinkedIn the other week and more or less asked our users to roast beehiiv publicly:

Over 200 people replied in total.

A few people DM’d me about the balls it takes to air this out in public. And I get it — I handed the entire internet an open mic to shit on our product, but two things.

One: 200+ responses means that people actually care. It’d be a lot scarier if nobody bothered to reply. I heard someone say once that if your company has an outage and no angry customers complain, the outage is the least of your problems.

Two: the upside dwarfs the downside. In a single afternoon I was able to triage feedback from 200+ users into a Q3 roadmap. Even better, I could share the raw feedback directly with the team so they could read it first-hand.

Here’s exactly what I did behind the scenes to make the most of it:

This seemingly didn’t go unnoticed. I received quite a lot of praise for the brazen approach to feedback, and even saw a few founders copy the strategy for themselves:

But it wasn’t all sunshine. While I am a huge advocate for radical candor, there are a few downsides to consider when you open yourself up to get roasted in the public square:

One: Team morale could take a hit. The overwhelming feedback was that our website builder isn’t living up to the expectations of our users. For those employees on the website team, it’s obviously a bit disheartening to see their hard work get criticized like that.

Two: The external narrative could get messy. Anyone scrolling that thread could decide not to try beehiiv due to a weakness we just advertised ourselves. Not ideal.

Three: I suppose we handed our competitors a list of talking points to use (while they still can). This one doesn’t concern me a ton, but it is what it is.

I can’t tell if I like this new one/two/three list format I’m trying.

As for the feedback itself, about 90% of it was related to the website builder or Ad Network. Both were already top priorities for Q3, but the harsh reality of this feedback humbled us and made us move faster.

The Ad Network complaints were less about product and more operational: users want more diverse, more relevant sponsorship opportunities at higher payouts. Heard loud and clear. In just the past two weeks we’ve brought on 20+ new advertisers and lifted the average payout by 20%. There's a whole lot more in flight too that users will feel soon.

As for the website builder — we already had a few engineers on it for Q3, but we opted to kill some other initiatives in favor of doubling down and adding more bandwidth to focus on it. There are lots of incremental fixes shipping now, and we’re a few weeks out from a totally reimagined builder that I think users are going to love.

There will always be something that users dislike the most. Unless everything is exactly equal, there has to be. But that’s the fun of building software: we identify that something, sprint to make it 10x better, then move onto whatever that next something is.

This exercise was just a shortcut to find that something faster.

This ego-less approach to company building is part of the secret sauce for product velocity as well. There’s a lot behind beehiiv’s product velocity: full-stack engineers with product and design chops, multiple projects running in parallel, and dialed QA to name a few. But one thing has to be true — we don’t let perfect get in the way of progress.

Every engineer knows the last 10% of the work can often eat 90% of the time. And that last 10% is usually built on a pile of assumptions that may not be true and edge cases that may not materialize.

Our approach: ship something that is 90% complete and a little rough around the edges, put it in users’ hands, and let them tell us what actually matters and what doesn’t. That gets us to a much better place, faster. Plus nothing focuses an engineering team like real people using the feature live on production.

The tradeoff is that you have to be ok potentially making a mediocre first impression. Which brings me back to where I started this post…

Not caring what people think of me is exactly what lets me be vulnerable about the work. I’ve untangled my ego from the current state of the product. A rough website builder isn’t a verdict on me, it’s a to-do list of things we need to prioritize. Getting roasted on X isn’t a personal attack, it’s a user-generated roadmap.

I’d rather make a mediocre first impression today and fix it fast, so the next hundred thousand people who sign up to beehiiv get to experience the better version.

It’s all the same muscle, and I’ve seemingly been working it everywhere lately.

Last week I went on David Begnaud’s podcast and cried 3 times lol (episode drops in a few weeks). Having six HD cameras in my face while I can barely get a word out, for a hundred thousand people to watch on YouTube, isn’t all that different from asking people to “roast my product” or shipping something at 90%. You put the real thing out there, unfinished and unguarded, and you let people see it.

Too many people never make progress because they’re afraid of taking that first unpolished step in front of others. Shipping a new feature, starting a company, launching a new project, asking someone out to dinner — it’s all the same bet. Life's too short to let other people's opinions get in the way.

Ship it to prod and let’s keep building.

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