Welcome to London

My buddy Rob went mega-viral on X (6.6M impressions). Then I copied his exact post template and ended up going viral myself (4M impressions).

Coincidence? Unlikely.

The secret is Kleo: The AI content tool top creators (and me) are using to grow their audience on LinkedIn and X in 2026.

Some of my favorite features:

One of my goals for 2026 was to grow my LinkedIn to 100,000 followers. I personally use Kleo every morning to write my daily post (and I’ve already added 8,000 followers in January alone).

Rob is one of the co-founders of Kleo and offered to give you an exclusive strategy session where he breaks down exactly how he engineers viral posts - just use code "BIGDESKENERGY" at signup to claim your spot.

Last week the beehiiv squad made the trip across the pond for an action-packed week in London. The goal was to meet with some of our existing UK-based creators, publishers, and journalists… and let everyone else know we’re open for business.

We hosted four separate events throughout the week and lined up dozens of in-person meetings with all of the top publishers in the region. It was a massive success, and a whole lot of fun. Here’s how the week went down…

Nothing beats kicking off a long week like the Medellin → Madrid → London red-eye. I left the eternal spring and arrived in a super dreary London just in time for dinner.

Instead of booking an overpriced hotel, I opted to split an Airbnb with my homie Rob so I could remind our CFO how fiscally responsible I am. Yeah, that’s the same Rob from the Kleo ad above. After grinding solo in Medellin for the past few months, I thought some founder-to-founder co-working would be a nice change of pace.

Naturally we grabbed a few pints to catch up, split the G, and hit a few pubs after dinner.

I woke up and was reminded that I’m no longer 24: a red-eye right into a night out was probably a terrible idea. That was followed by the reminder that I needed a coat because I understandably don’t own one in Colombia.

We grabbed breakfast then went shopping in Soho. I’m going to consider this more of a jacket than a coat, but it was a very necessary purchase for the week.

After securing the bag, I went back to the Airbnb to knock out a ton of work and prepare for the week ahead. The Super Bowl started way past my bedtime, so I was asleep well before kickoff.

According to Spotify Wrapped, Bad Bunny was my top artist of 2025. True to form, I had to watch the halftime show — which was probably the best one since Prince?

After catching up with everything else that happened while I was asleep (so I could make proper small talk), I headed to the gym to finally get back into routine.

I met with Dan Thomas from the FT at some grungy members-only club that used to be full of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll in the 90s (allegedly). It was a great meet and an opportunity to learn a lot about the UK media ecosystem.

I grabbed lunch with one of the newest members of the beehiiv squad, then went back to the Airbnb in time for the day’s (virtual) meetings, followed by a team dinner with the local London-based employees.

…was a doozy.

I met with Charlotte Tobbit from the Press Gazette to chat about beehiiv and our ambitions to expand in Europe. Then I skipped across town to have lunch with a few of our London-based investors.

Bertie and the BWC team led our $1.6M seed extension way back in 2022. He asked me to do a fireside chat for their startup community while I was in town.

I had no expectations going into the event, especially given the tight turnaround, but was pretty blown away by the 75+ founders who came out in the middle of the day to hear my story. It felt a bit like an IRL podcast, and people stuck around for hours afterwards to meet and chat.

I went right from the fireside to a 40-person dinner we hosted with the who’s who of UK media: The Guardian, The Times, Sky News, The Daily Mail, BBC, The Nerve, and plenty of others.

Dinner ran late and I finally got back home around 10pm to start my (work) day. Whether or not I’m running around town all day — the real work still needs to get done. I ended up staying up til 3am before wrapping for the night.

For those of you who have been reading for a while, you know that I prefer waking up super early, being in the gym by 7am, and working west coast hours. That’s all to say, I absolutely hate working in the European timezone.

I slept til 10am trying to unfuck my sleep schedule (didn’t work). Then I quickly ran to the gym before booting up work and taking meetings from the Airbnb all day.

We hosted a Press Party that evening with tons of media execs and some of the most impressive journalists I’ve ever been around. I got to hear some pretty remarkable stories told by those who have been reporting from active war zones in Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza.

We also had quite a few of our users in attendance, who were great to finally meet in person.

We co-hosted a full-day event with Google at their beautiful London office. It was loaded with tons of great sessions about media and tech.

I kicked it off with a 45-minute presentation on audience ownership and strategies to hyper-scale a newsletter.

The rest of the event was loaded with far more impressive speakers like the ex-President of CBS News, Wendy McMahon; Co-Founder of Local News International, Lauren Saks; Co-Founder at The Nerve, Sarah Donaldson; and Alex Schmitt from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

After the event concluded, we co-hosted a happy hour down the street with Brian Morrissey from The Rebooting. The place was packed with beehiiv users (and soon-to-be users) and lots of great vibes.

One of my homies from a previous Costa Rica Mastermind flew in from Dublin and a handful of us hit the Hawksmoor for dinner before we each went our separate ways for the night.

One of Rob’s co-founders, Lara Acosta, is based in London and is a bit of a LinkedIn savant. She has a video team and invited us to the studio to record some content about launching a digital product on beehiiv and promoting it with the help of Kleo.

The rest of the day was just a block of virtual meetings, a personal order of 3 chicken tikka masalas, and our first ever team AI Show and Tell.

5am wakeup, 12 hours in the air, and 2 incredibly dialed-in lads. I can’t tell if it’s a blessing or a curse, but after the long chaotic week I genuinely couldn’t wait to board the plane and work for the entire duration of the flight.

I’m so grateful to have had such a warm reception in London, to meet so many talented people, loyal users, and others who just took such an interest in what we’re building. I have a feeling you’re going to see a whole lot more of beehiiv in the UK.

But we don’t have any plans to stop there. We’re on the verge of building something special, something with much larger global ambitions.

This was just the first of many stops 😈.

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Shoutout Kurt for the reader submission 🫡.

Having a (real) background like that on calls might be one of the biggest flexes imaginable.

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

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