We almost sold

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Almost exactly one year ago, I sent our March 2025 investor update recapping what was a stellar Q1. Here’s the intro to that email:

I felt like we were on top of the world. We were setting new milestones seemingly each week and I was convinced that 2025 was going to be a blowout year.

Then Q2 happened.

We had normalized an irrational amount of spending without having the attribution or data to justify it. We didn’t have a coherent strategy, and the things that were working in the early days were no longer working.

By the end of the quarter, it was clear: the team that got us to $20M ARR wasn’t going to be the team to get us to $200M ARR. One Monday in late July, I woke up and fired a third of the growth team, leadership and all. It was one of my worst days as a founder.

We immediately paused everything we were doing and cut spending by 90%. We needed new leadership, a new strategy, and a complete and total reset.

One thing I knew for sure — this was going to be an extremely painful process.

Momentum is everything for startups. And after three years of consistent 8-15% monthly revenue growth, we made the painful decision to intentionally slam the brakes. It’s better to stop than to sprint in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, on the product side we found ourselves approaching an inflection point. Our 2024 acquisition of Typedream (a YC-backed AI website builder) was finally starting to bear fruit. Users could now build beautiful custom websites directly in beehiiv.

But to me, the website builder was just the front door. Get our foot in, earn the trust, and suddenly we're not just hosting your newsletter — we're the platform for your entire business. Digital products, podcasts, link-in-bio, the whole thing.

This was the big vision that I had pitched to the company to kick off 2025. And if we were going to pause and reset the growth program, I figured it was best to wait until after this vision became a reality before attempting to re-accelerate the business.

Over the summer I was in Costa Rica hosting a founder mastermind when I got a ton of inspiration from another founder on the trip (btw if you’re interested in joining an upcoming mastermind, drop your info here). He told a story about a live product webinar he hosted for all of his customers and leads. The event drove over a million dollars of new revenue.

I studied our upcoming product roadmap and realized that all of our tentpole initiatives were on pace to launch at roughly the same time later in the year. Then I had a vision. I wanted to create an Apple keynote type of launch event. We’d pre-record it IRL, invite tens of thousands of our customers, then livestream the event while announcing feature after feature.

The goal was to reposition the company as more than just a newsletter platform. The timing would give us a few months to prepare, reload the growth team with the right people, and build a growth strategy worthy of the moment.

Granted, we had never done anything like this before. We’re an entirely remote company, so it was a bit out of the box to suggest to our CFO that we’re going to fly in a bunch of people to NYC to do a full day video shoot. It’s not the craziest idea, but it’s also a massive bet and expense for something that we’ve never attempted before.

But that’s the best part about being a founder. You can be a dreamer. I had a vision for something that I thought should exist, spent the weekend writing a proposal to build my case, and presented it to the company the following Monday.

A weekend idea. 72 hours later, 100 people were rowing in the same direction. We had a plan, but the event was still months away.

Meanwhile, the cognitive dissonance of those next several months was intense. On one hand, I felt like we were on the verge of delivering a category defining product — it would genuinely keep me up at night. On the other hand, we weren’t growing. It turns out that firing a third of your growth team and cutting spend by 90% isn’t exactly a recipe for success.

There's a specific kind of dread that comes with running an unprofitable startup that isn't growing. Being unprofitable means that we were losing money each month. It means that we are always on the clock to either reach profitability or raise additional capital — both felt further away by the day.

Those were some of the most stressful days I can recall building the company. I was working overtime to deliver on the product side of things, and also had to step in and run the growth team while we searched for a new team lead. Plus, you know all of the other things like hiring, sales and partnership calls, board meetings, work travel, etc.

It’s easy to ignore burnout while you’re growing. But the dopamine that used to hit from refreshing Stripe had turned into a steady stream of anxiety when the growth dried up.

During this stretch, a handful of companies suddenly came inbound looking to explore M&A. I wasn’t looking to sell the company. I knew that we hadn’t achieved even a fraction of what this business was capable of.

But the market can be irrational at times, and it was hot. We suddenly had a rush of massive players around the table, and it felt foolish to not at least hear them out. So in addition to everything else I was balancing, we were in talks with four different potential acquirers.

I felt all of the founder emotions one could possibly feel.

Some days I would wake up and see nothing but upside. We could grow so much faster, join a company with hundreds of millions of users, and best-of-all — be able to focus and execute without the stress and anxiety of being an unprofitable startup.

Then other days I would be so excited about what we’re building that I couldn’t imagine getting out of the driver’s seat. I’d ping pong between both of those on a daily hourly basis.

But the show must go on. We recorded what became the Winter Release Event live in New York, then live-streamed it in November. It turned out 10x better than what I had initially imagined earlier that summer.

We launched digital products, an AI website builder, a link in bio tool, a suite of website analytics, a podcast integration, a powerful new automation suite, and more. We had thousands of people join the livestream and got a ton of press covering the event.

It was a real company-defining moment for us. If nothing else, I was really proud of the event, and the team. The production and final product I think exceeded everyone’s expectations.

And as painful as it was to execute the plan, it was showing signs of success. We rebuilt the growth team from scratch and cut our burn rate from a peak of $1.5M per month in Q2 down to $200K in November. Meanwhile, we were riding high after the success of the Winter Release Event.

But five months feels like an eternity for startups. Some of our investors were getting antsy, or at least, it felt pretty obvious that we had fallen out of favor with some of them.

We at one point were this high-flying company that was the star of their portfolio, and then in 2025 all of these AI companies that were growing 10x YoY took their attention (rightfully so) while we were growing a measly 2% MoM.

A few of our investors were pretty persistent that we should continue to test the market and find a deal, worried that we may have already peaked as a company. But I pushed back and reiterated my confidence in the product, the new leadership we were bringing on, and our game plan for 2026.

We had gotten through the worst part of the plan, and now it was finally time to execute the best part.

I kept coming back to the fact that all of the most successful companies in the world, at one point went through difficult periods. I mean, Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy in 1997 before Steve Jobs came back as CEO. And almost every other company that makes up your 401(k) had several sustained periods of slower growth and turmoil.

The stress and pressure feels insurmountable in those moments, but I knew that it wasn’t going to define us. That was, despite a lot of our closest backers losing faith in us, and me.

When we got back from the holidays, it was finally time to execute what we had been planning for months. In fact, you can see the drastic uptick in revenue take place almost exactly on the first day of the year.

The result? Q1 was the best quarter in company history. We added nearly $4.5M ARR and are pacing ahead of our $50M revenue goal for 2026.

We sent over 10B emails. Both the enterprise sales team and ad sales team had record quarters. And we shipped a laundry list of features that make beehiiv a truly differentiated platform.

A few weeks ago we launched the beehiiv MCP — making beehiiv the first newsletter platform you can run directly through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity.

Then we introduced the ability for users to host, distribute, and monetize their podcasts directly on beehiiv. We shattered our podcast adoption goal for Q2 within the first 6 hours of launch.

We’re in the driver’s seat now. We have what I believe to be the most robust platform in the industry, with the best business model, and the most talented team… and it’s not even close.

I find it comical that we were at one point even slightly considered selling the business. I don’t trust that any company can truly shepherd the potential of what we’re building better than we can.

The real lesson? Be careful who you take advice from. Everyone at the table has different incentives.

There were a lot of times in Q4 where it felt like I was truly in this thing all alone. It was dark.

But that’s what I think it takes to be a good founder. When every signal says quit, sometimes you have to be crazy enough to believe there's another way out.

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