How To Make $500,000 A Month In SAAS - Beehiiv Founder

0:00how much money is beehive making right now right now so this is our 19th or 20th month we'll make about 500 000 this month so you're like a 50 to 100 million dollar business right now depending on the market the valuations how you're valuing yeah maybe huge advocate of beehive for a while a big user ourselves we have a newsletter about 70 000 people and there's nothing else even close to beehive right now in the market and you guys have come in at such a unique angle that I just need to get inside your mind like how did you make such a user-centric broad I think

0:32we could cut it right now put that on the 30 second ad and you can be the face of our uh our brand um yeah I mean the story has been told many times I guess my background is coming from morning brew and so I joined as a second employee built that company alongside the early employees the co-founders up until acquisition and so just having an inside track of what it takes to build a successful newsletter it's very different from I think newsletters are interesting I'm going to build software around that yeah I know exactly what it took like in the weeds to build this newsletter from 50 000

1:03subscribers when I join to three and a half million when I left so what data did we collect how do we slice it what dashboards do we did we use uh what was like the referral program what were the different growth mechanisms and so I think having like a very fast user-centric approach to this is how we have had the success that we've had early on so you essentially built all the internal like Business Solutions inside of morning Brew no one if you don't know morning Brew is a newsletter yeah a few million subscribers sold for like 70 something million dollars a few years ago and one of the most well-known

1:34stories today but this man built all their internal systems and actually basically kind of built beehive internally for them and then saw that as an opportunity to bring it to Market as a separate entity once you left morning Brew I used like I love startups and Tech and I idolized like the early stories of like Facebook and apple and like just like Silicon Valley startups and those are the stories I would read growing up the bookside read and it was my dream to start a company and so that you always have been in entrepreneurship why did you work at morning Brew for three and a half years and then why'd

2:05you go to Google Austin Reef who's the co-founder now CEO of morning Brew is from Baltimore as well and he reached out to me I was like on an hour-long car ride home from DC and he was like just like inventing about the business and the opportunity this is when morning Brew probably had 30 40 000 subscribers like very early on he was debating going full time or like raising money and going full time or doing a big Investment Banking job in New York and one thing he said was like did you know barcel is making like 40 of their revenue through merch or whatever the

2:34number was but he was interested in merch I was like dude I got you shop if I swear like oh okay let me help you build like because they had some brand Affinity with like the mug and the logo and people wanted t-shirts some hats or coffee mugs so the first idea was like I'll help you build a Shopify store and then we started talking he was like the scam is growing so quickly they were kind of like the Trailblazers in the newsletter space and they have millions of subscribers and they have this like skin ambassadors program this referral program that works really well all these

3:03girls in New York that read it like love their Ambassador programmer always sharing it he's like we should imitate that and so he came to me and was like can you build this for like three thousand dollars on the the side as I was freelancing my parents basement building different projects and the answer was like no I had absolutely no idea how to do it but I kid you not I have a screenshot on my phone I think I had like two dollars and fifty cents in my bank account and I told him I was like yeah I can figure that out no problem and for three weeks I was

3:31building this referral program making it up as I went had no idea almost quit like five separate times at like 2 A.M I'd be up and I'd be like genuinely I lied about being able to do this and I have no idea how I get past where I am now and almost texted him ended up not finishing it well I ended up not texting him and finishing it and he looks at me paid me the three thousand dollars it's like we have so many other projects to build if you want to keep working with us throughout the summer while you apply for full-time jobs so I just started

3:59Contracting for them like 40 60 hours a week building the website building making the referral program better building different components on like for the newsletter and the safe I have like a hundred twenty thousand dollars of student debt just from paying for school myself and so the safe move was I'm just gonna go to DC live with my friend and work at Deloitte as a consultant and then out of nowhere like I signed the offer was going to start in two weeks and Austin hits me up and goes what do you think about joining morning Brew full time coming up to New York and like at the time and in retrospect seems

4:30like a no-brainer morning Brew went on to be very successful at the time they had 50 000 subscribers it was the two co-founders and a writer and in NYU like dorm room type office thing and I have so much debt and it was like such a risk at the time and one of my friends who I went to with like just career advice was like you're gonna be one of 50 000 people in that job at Deloitte or the only person in the world building morning brew and doing that thing and I just completely bet on myself dropped girlfriend life in DC friend moved up to New York in two

5:04months and that was kind of how I got into the morning Brew equity for taking that risk initially was that promised yeah yeah so like it's pretty common in most startups to have some bit of equity uh yeah at a few percent a few percent few percent not bad at all after the outcome that happened yeah but but you did touch on something that I'm really I think it's a really good lesson you said yes to doing something that you had no idea how to do and the like Hustler in you said yes I can do this but internally you're freaking out because you have no idea how to make this

5:33referral system so do you advise people to do that because you weren't that technical but then you grew went on to like literally build all of the technical internal tools for morning Brew so almost you saying yes to doing something forced you to learn and then you're able to actually figure it out somehow just the internet and then made your whole career and now you have a huge business that is a software company so has that just been like a theme for like happy it's my own demise of like just stress and like I've probably cut off like 10 to 15 years of my life like

6:05always dealing making that decision but I would actually attribute most of my success in my career to putting myself in situations where I was always way over my head because I'm not someone who's ever going to give up and when you're not going to give up and you're in way over your head the only way is up and hustling and figuring out whether it means late nights whether it means watching tutorials online scheduling calls with people who know what they're doing and learning from them like there's multiple paths to figure out how to solve whatever problem it is did you do that a lot schedule calls with people

6:35and ask them I mean even that warning I knew nothing about email or newsletters mewall I was given the job of growing this email newsletter and building the internal attack for it and so I would just schedule demos with like MailChimp or campaign monitor like all these different platforms well because they would they were vendors to us oh okay so that we were trying to vet like you should we send and I had no idea even like what I should be looking at yeah so I like schedule call with other people in the newsletter space who knew they would hit different pain points and be like what should I be looking out for

7:04when I go to these calls and then when we jumped on the calls with like campaign monitor hypothetically it would be like talking about deliverability and I like they'd rush over and I'd be like wait what is that like what what should I know about this and why are you better than the competitors and so I was like scheduling demos with every like email vendor or like software vendor in the space in like the newsletter space and the CMS space just to understand what I didn't know which was everything that was possible like 10 15 years ago but now that we have the internet like it it

7:34really is you crazy figure anything out yeah literally all day that's so cool did you leave on good terms like they didn't leave right when they sold you left I left like a few weeks before and I had no idea that they were getting acquired so I'd say like yes and no for three and a half years at morning Brew I kind of had no restrictions of what to do they trusted me and they said if you think this is going to work try it for a month or to and fortunately like there's definitely some luck involved a lot of the things I built and tried ended up

8:03working so they kept giving me more responsibility to try new things and so we did that we scaled over three million subscribers and then I started to see the writing on the wall like okay they're making I don't know 15 20 million dollars a year now I am 26 Still self-taught and they're gonna start legitimizing the business bringing in people who have been like a product manager at Vice or Vox for 10 years and one I'm definitely like a bit stubborn and I was like I know this space better than anyone that they could bring in and I know this business inside and out and so there's a part of me that's like I

8:38don't really want to report to anyone else and then there was also the part of me of yes I'm willing to learn from other people but I don't know if a PM at Vice is like who I want to learn from yeah it's like you're getting chained or something like it's just like a media company PM isn't what I found like super aspirational I wanted to learn from like big Tech and like what are the the products and Company that are making billions of dollars like how do they do product and so tying that all together I kind of saw the writing on the wall that I was about

9:06to have a boss that was in Austin and get hired over oh that's and and the time came where I don't know three and a half years is a long time to be anywhere and it went from there was so much to do I could do anything and build anything to everything was built it was like optimizing the website to convert a little bit better so I'd say the fun part was kind of running out for me personally like the product and Engineering space Sorry that was like the itch of what else can I do and build and like this was a great chapter I owe

9:35everything that Alex and Austin for giving me the opportunity and I was like I think I'm down to try something else as like a next step in my career and just like kind of building out like the resume like I knew I was always going to build a startup and a company at one point but it was where do I go to refine the skills that I know that I'm not great at and being able to learn what product management is everyone says Google's like the gold standard of product management there's like real process there's like how you think about user Journeys I go I don't know what any

10:01of that means like in an actual process standpoint so let's go figure that out and that's kind of how I ended up at Google would you say you got that out of the experience like 100 okay in retrospect like I can I was there for 10 months it was like a it was a pit stop and it was during covid and I've always thought about doing that like I feel like that is a gap in my knowledge so what were like the three like biggest takeaways yeah obviously you left I mean everybody yeah but everything there was about process so the way that they did it at Google that I learned is if you

10:32want to build a product or a feature like a product requirement document like a PRD is like a full like 5 10 15 page paper of here's how it should work here's what it looks like with what are the mock-ups what do you what happens when you click on this button where does that take users it was like the target user how do you measure success like typical things that you'd want to know like figma design like you throw in like formal design but also just like yeah but also just explaining like here's like how users get to this feature this is why it's useful this is why we're

11:01allocating like eight Engineers time for two months to build this outcome it's almost like making it a an argument for why you're building and gotcha other because like for example like in retrospect at morning brew and I said I'm gonna spend three months building ACM Mass I had no idea how I was going to do that I didn't think about any of the obstacles and I had no idea what it was going to look like or how it was going to work at the end which is like as dumb as possible like it would have been much easier just to plan for two weeks so this is what the final state is

11:28here's the components we're going to use this is like the tech we're going to use and the end goal is this and I think it'll be worth it because XYZ so that's how like normal companies think about things before they invest like tons of people and money and time into building it and I never knew that I was just like kind of building whatever I felt like building at morning Brew so I'd say understanding that from Google like what are the different components of that document and like what's the case to be made was totally new to me and then once you have like this is how it should work

11:55how it should look now an engineer owns it and they kind of build like a technical scoping document of here's what we're adding in the database here like the models we're adding here's like the actual code that is going to make that thing come to life and then the engineer like kind of owns that process it's kind of like the same process but for engineering instead of product so do you build off this this master sheet as you go or you're more so just planning it all together so then four different levels of management can improve it 30 different people on the teams can see it

12:22so they're on the same page for the product side it's like part of it's like pitching to management of like this it's like more of a layman's terms of this is what's going to happen this is how we're building it when the engineering side like you don't want to have an engineer or a team of Engineers just coding and tinkering for weeks without like an end goal so the goal is for them to say here's how we're going to build it exactly how this is exactly how her God jailed it and then you pitch it to like the engineers and the engineers will poke holes in and be like actually I

12:46think it'd be more performant if you do it like this or you're completely forgetting this other thing that we built previously that will help you do x y z but you're basically just getting sign off and more smart people's opinion before someone goes heads down for six weeks building something which makes perfect sense and then once the product team and managers and end users have seen the like the PRD and they're like okay that looks good and then the engineers have seen the technical Doc and the engineer's like I agree that's a great way to build it then the engineer can go and build it and then it works as

13:15it's described and it fits into the PRD anyway that's all totally new to me and something I had no idea that existed prior to Google Google we couldn't like build a button without those two steps yeah and like 10 15 pages of each it's a lot of time it's a lot of time and it's a lot of planning and like Google and you know the people both from PMS to Engineers are really expensive and they don't want to waste people's time and they don't want to have someone build something that doesn't make sense or work as it should so I'd say that is my biggest takeaway for my 10 months at

13:44Google outside the fact that nothing really gets done at Lord that'll probably is the most valuable takeaway for what you transitioned into for beehive you're probably that process that I just described is exactly how we've built everything at bihive to an extent less bureaucracy than what you would get at Google obviously and much quicker and quicker turn around and everything but the systems more or less the exact same any feature or product release that's over a certain threshold we do the PRD we do the technical scoping doc we get sign off and then they build it and then they ship it um but I would have had no idea how to

14:17do that if it wasn't for my 10 month stint at Google just knowing how the best people in the world do something is super valuable because then you're not like questioning is there better method am I being like inefficient in a way and so seeing firsthand and knowing for sure this is how the biggest company in the world operates and then bringing that to your own company I can just imagine that's way more valuable than the salary you're getting but yeah I mean that's also like my chip on the shoulder for everything is that I was as a self-taught software developer every time I coded a single line of code

14:48anywhere I was like did I do that right are you kind of insecure yeah I've always been like and the thing is and you learn later that a lot of people who went through the computer science program they don't teach you how to build websites in a lot of the or most computer science programs don't so a lot of the engineers who did like four years of Cs actually didn't learn the things I was building anyway but not being told by like a teacher or Superior like this is how it's done I was writing code for morning Brew for four years when they had millions of readers and like I was

15:17the boss of like the engineering team and I had every time I typed a line of code I go I don't know if this is right or perform it or if there's a better way yeah but that's like yeah there's like different spectrums I'd say I'm far right on like the [ __ ] it let's see what happens or as long as it works I'm it's good enough for me and then as I've hired Engineers they're much on like here's the most efficient optimized process and it might take like three weeks longer but it will be the most performant and I love that balance because we end

15:45up meeting somewhere in between of like we don't need the most perfect elegant Solution that's going to last to the year like three thousand we just need something that works for the next four to five years so let's get it to Market quicker um so to get balance that that's funny because you got like the most Scrappy just figured out at Morning Bird then you go to Google it's just complete far right the most extreme and now you have beehive which is probably perfectly in the middle and it's so interesting for the engineers too because like that is like how they show off like their intellect is like I've thought about the

16:10most performant way to build acne and I think it's more performant than the way that you're proposing and they kind of like nerd off on like what's the better solution and I'm like there's real Market opportunity being wasted by not already having something live and I'm getting it from 15 of our users that this needs to be live yesterday so like let's just get to Market and it's finding the balance between good solution that works well and won't break but it doesn't need to be the most performant thing at least like not today yeah I think going the unconventional route of learning you definitely got more range like you have much more

16:39diverse knowledge and you're going to pick and choose what you needed that you could action immediately at morning Brew instead of like a textbook here's what you can do so it kind of opens up more creativity yeah for sure speaking of creativity let's go to beehive yeah this is what I really like this yeah yeah if you're gonna sit in the podcast let's send it at this point yeah this is where it's gonna get really detailed so beehive the most valuable way I've thought about it is typically for a newsletter uh business if you don't know a newsletter is just like you send an email to people every week about a topic

17:06but most people just write in a Google doc and then uploads like a MailChimp and then send it out to a thousand people and then they would just get an email list from like a quick maybe like a MailChimp landing page at best if they even had that back then but beehive has like the most streamlined user-friendly system to grow scale and write a newsletter and now actually get sponsors which was like the most annoying process for us so I totally understand all the value from beehive here but what I want to understand is what when you launched 19 months ago what did you go to market

17:38with what features existed and why did you choose those features yeah so and even to take a step back from what you were describing like I saw that entire cycle while at morning Brew like we had a custom built like Squarespace word or a Squarespace website that collected emails and that like somehow connected to MailChimp to send the email yeah it wasn't even connected from MailChimp and then like we had a WordPress website that we would type stories into and then our writers would copy and paste it into like an HTML template and send it on MailChimp clunky so like what a lot of people even to

18:10this day still do is they have like some web content which is like a web flow or WordPress where their blog lives totally separate they have like their email list sometimes they collect emails like IRL and upload them via CSV otherwise they like literally take them from like their WordPress site export them and import them before sending it's like very convoluted yeah and so there's a lot of value in having a streamlined process where the website the blog and the newsletter all live like symbiotically and that's kind of what we've built at morning brew and so to answer your question of what we want to Market with

18:44you pitch it pretty well in like almost like internal morning brood tools like morning Brew in a box it sub Sac launched I think four or five years ago and their core Innovation I think was combining the website with the newsletter with premium subscriptions so that already existed in the market where I thought that they were weak and just talking to users who were complaining about using the existing Solutions like the referral program was kind of like a holy grail of morning Brew when I was there it led to over a million subscribers which is crazy we had a list dedicated to people who had more than three referrals and that list

19:19had over a hundred thousand people on it it's like bigger than like 95 of email lists in general and those were just for people with more than three referrals so the referral program was a massive growth driver for us and I wrote like a blog post on it that's like very detailed and I still get hit up about it so that was like a golden nugget of what people wanted at the end of the day I think most content creators care about like two things it's growing and monetizing and if you can create tools that allow them to grow quicker and monetize more most content creators

19:48businesses Publishers are very happy so the positioning was the existing Solutions in the market we can do everything that they can do you can post content to the website you can also simultaneously send out a newsletter we'll handle all of that for you there's no know like exporting importing will give you a referral program to help you streamline and scale your audience quicker which I had the legitimacy and credibility from morning Brew saying I've already built morning Brews which is like an industry leading referral program so now for 99 a month you get the same thing that made morning Brew or one of the many things that made morning

20:21Brew successful out of the box like minimal setup so that was a good go to market strategy that was very intentional and then the other one was yes on sub stack or member for like any of the other platforms you can do a premium subscription you don't have to worry about stripe and billing and payments and we'll do that but we won't take a cut of Revenue so if you're making a hundred thousand dollars a month and they're taking ten percent you can just move over to our platform you keep the full hundred thousand minus the stripe fees and so hitting on the two main components of growing faster and

20:52monetizing more was like our initial go to market so the core features you got the landing page builder and you collect emails correct yep and then you could do a referral program natively within the platform and then you could do a paid subscription for your newsletter did I miss one yeah I mean and like send newsletter so you create there's a net there's an editor you post a web like a Blog you post as an email you can do both at the same time and then you can do premium subscriptions and you can do the referral program so this is basically like the solopreneurs like dream setup or the Creator that you

21:22reference because what you referenced was kind of how the big companies were doing it they had dozens of developers on their team they have the website they have SMS or an SMS uh CMS what is it email yeah yeah sure they had all these different like websites to collect information they communicate because they had the budget and the people to do it but if you're just an everyday person with a skill and a specific interest it was a lot of money a lot of different tools a lot of time and you just want to write about the specific topic so you just made it as easy as possible for

21:50people to make a place for people to subscribe write the email send it out and then grow all in one place and that was your go to market strategy exactly and the thing is like most really really talented Engineers aren't dying to work at like a small publisher right even like the tech teams that do exist at a lot of these Publishers and small like media startups aren't like the top tier talent I mean typically and like what we built at morning group took me and a team of three additional Engineers three and a half years to build so we built this like perfect ecosystem for email

22:21newsletters to grow quickly to understand who our audience is to be able to sell advertisements and monetize and it took us trialing and airing and failing so many times and three and a half years of a team of dedicated Engineers just for that and so the value prop is if you could take everything that we learned in those three and a half years and you don't need to hire four engineers and you don't need a piece together eight different pieces of software or build your own solution wouldn't it be a lot nicer to pay 99 a month and have people that know how to do it provide that for you out of the

22:52box and that was like our initial go to market strategy so how did you launch so we were building it while I was at Google so like Knights and on the sides on the side oh nice which is like very stressful it's like the classic like startup Journey but like I mean some people are like [ __ ] it I have enough money to live off of I'm just gonna go in a whole work for a few months try to raise money I again like I've had one job prior to this I'm morning Brew like younger in my career still have student debt so as de-risked as possible like I

23:20had a job and I was doing nights and weekends which is incredibly draining but it was also I think I benefited a bit from it being covered so like there wasn't like fun things to do per se like I was kind of like stuck inside anyway one of the most productive days of my life I built the big desk Energy website during that like where other people were like oh this is sick let's like order in wine and watch Netflix for like eight hours like I never watched Tiger King but like that was awesome I was like now that I've been giving like because I caved to peer pressure

23:49guy I have like a social life I want to go out hang out with friends but now that you've removed that as an option how do I actually view this as like a massive opportunity where I don't have to be like some loser like no I don't want to hang out like I have no one that makes a lot of I have no one to say no to and like I don't have to make up excuses there was nothing to do so I was like how can I just be as much of a psychopath right now and go heads down and provide as much value and learn and

24:12build things so this is 20 20. we started like fall of 2020 into like the summer of 2021 nights weekends just like hustling building this company and the whole time like I think any entrepreneur or like early startup is just super anxious because like very often very rare for you to be the first one to Market so you're always going against competitors that already exist you already have a team of 10 20 30 people who already have a ton of money and you're going to Market because you think you can either do it better than them or you're taking a different approach to solve a problem that they're not doing a

24:46good job of solving but it's also like the most anxiety-inducing time because if my thesis hypothetically was we're going to go to market with a referral program that entire 12 months of like stealth of us building all it took was like one of our competitors to be like oh that sounds like a great idea we're gonna launch like an amazing referral program MIM mcdaf morning brew and I'm sitting there with no money and just like hustling on like two o'clock in the morning on like a Saturday and I go [ __ ] like I just bet all my eggs in this basket and I've been hustling and like

25:16it's not the only differentiator but it was one of those your anger it was wondering that we were gonna go to market with and like that I knew would be splashy and every day I'd wake up with fake that anxiety of like did any of like our main like five six competitors launch something similar to what we're building now again sub Sac was already raised I think they were worth like 600 mil at this point and like the clear market leader of the new age newsletter platform and like we're making waves there Facebook just launched bulletin like a few months before we started raising money that is it was like their attempt

25:47to do like a newsletter platform as a part of Facebook because they have infinite dollars they were just going to like Malcolm Gladwell and like all these A-list writers and paying them to create newsletters on bulletin which never made any sense but they have enough money to try anything Twitter bought review a year earlier which was on Twitter's newsletter platform and a lot of newsletter people are pretty active on Twitter it's like a pretty one-to-one correlation good at writing good at writing newsletters and they had like the whole sign up in your bio which is like everyone viewed as like the greatest thing ever and so

26:19we got to Market we we built it up until summer of 2021 we raised a seed round in July of 2020. so from that time to when you raised how long was that I think we did about like 10 months amongst yourself begins me and my two co-founders how much did you raise in the seed we did 2.6 million oh my God in the seed yeah so but did you launch the product before that before you raised the seed round no so we were like in like the MVP like had a prototype and I think I tweeted Maybe right before I started going out to raise money I tweeted like that was when

26:53I like put my cards on the table I was like I've been building a newsletter platform that will do XYZ not ticket cutter Revenue has a referral program um and totally customizable website newsletter if that's something you'd be interested in sign up for our wait list here so I just did like a Google Forum wait list got I think like 450 500 people to sign up just a tweet just a tweet and something followers would you have I just don't have that many followers maybe like 3 000 at the time you had three thousand followers and 500 of them signed up to try it yeah well

27:22then you kind of had people I kind of been like cultivating like I had a query dense of like 10 to 15 people that I was like have they have they launched this yet or do you think that this is a good way to build this like I had like an internal Squad of people that I was just bouncing ideas off of or like I'd show them a screenshot yeah you prefer a or b and they'd be big okay let's go with B nice so it's kind of cultivating like early adopters um and they were pretty big in the newsletter space so I I mean as far as I

27:47don't know how big or small the newsletter Market it is but like I had that kind of down for my morning Brew days and like that was is what I was working with it's kind of hard for me to tell because I've been like obsessed with the newsletter YouTube like Sam Parr where I've been like in it for like a year and same with Twitter so like I'm in this algorithm and so I don't know you see is it like yeah is it like is it everything that's all you see that's all I see yeah it's like every person has a newsletter now is it like super popular

28:10or am I just like bombarded because that's what my algorithms trained for you've got probably both yeah I would say like I think people are catching on to like all the different mediums like this right here this podcast you have like real equipment you have like an editor you have to chop it up it's a lot of work it's a lot of effort the unit economics of a newsletter are so amazing and so what does that mean unit economics like whether you're sending to 10 people or 10 million people scalable the amount of work that goes into the newsletter is more or less the same yeah

28:37and like the infrastructure costs are also like very favorable in terms of like the actual cost to send the emails gotcha so the way that I looked at it is there was a point at morning Brew when it was the two Founders there was the writer there was me and someone on growth and so we had sales down which was what one of the founders was working on we had writing we had growth and we had Tech something four and a half five people and we were making five six million dollars a year at that point and like they decided to go the Venture back of like how much bigger can we make this

29:04and like made the right decisions they got acquired for a lot of money yeah but like we could have made that a lifestyle business and us five could have been printing between five and ten million dollars a year and like that output that we were put like the effort we were putting into that remained constant whether we were sending to 1 million people or we could have scaled that to 10 15 million readers so it's like the effort that goes into a newsletter is pretty flat and with platforms like beehive that make it so affordable to get started like there's no like upfront risk like you can get started for free

29:33can you explain a lifestyle business because I like that term what that I mean that like what that is like a lifestyle business yeah a lifestyle business versus like a startup venture-backed startup I think Venture back startup is like you're always chasing more and more money higher growth and like you like there's no there's no end to it you're either if you've already saturated your Market you're looking for new markets you're looking to hire new teams you're looking to make the product a bit better you're trying to get better margins which I guess like every business kind of is but a lifestyle business is like what if you

30:02could just print three to five million dollars and like everyone it does have to be a dollar amount but you're making enough money and you can take care of the people who are working for you and everyone gets paid really well and you're like okay I'm good just do what do this well maybe everyone's making like 250 300K and like it's great like you don't have aspirations to flip it and sell it for 10 15 20 million dollar vacation you can have it but you also have not always chasing growth and as someone who has always chased growth and like the big thing and try to make

30:29things better there's a big part of me that admires people who like chill yeah who can just be like yo this is good and I'm gonna go into two like you just got back from a three week vacation right like I would love to go away for a few days and chill and not think about work and I'm so far from that but there's plenty of people that have a situation in business where it's not constantly chasing the next thing and they're doing really well they're solving a problem they have a successful business and they're probably living a much healthier lifestyle without the expectations that they need to keep doing more a

30:59newsletter is a really good lifestyle business for like solo creators for sure ten thousand dollars twenty thousand dollars a month super achievable and they can just write one newsletter a week you can also do it as a complete side project right A lot of people are PMS at a company or have like a great paying job but they have a hobby or passion towards either something related to their work or something totally different that they're just interested in and because they're interested in it they want to learn about it they want to write about it they develop influence in this space and then they get advertisers

31:27or they do premium subscriptions Affiliates like there's so many different ways to monetize a newsletter it really is just like top of funnel and even if you don't go for like hey I want to make thousands of dollars from this newsletter maybe 15 000 people follow you because you're an expert at the Phoenix Suns and you know everything about the roster their team their GM and whatever and you've grown influence in a space that people look up to you in some capacity and like there's a lot of advantages to that maybe get a job at the Phoenix Suns right 100 and the network like random connections of

31:56people like there's so many doors I could open but I never realized how much money you can make from newsletters no matter who you are or what you do you should start a newsletter it is the best way for business owners to talk to their customers build an email list and most importantly increase sales sporting Brew the newsletter sold for 75 million dollars and you can literally get started completely for free on beehive and start monetizing immediately so to help you guys get started we created a list of 80 different newsletter ideas and we'll send that to you completely for free just click the first link in

32:29the description below but I never realized how much money you can make from newsletters until like seven months ago like people told me to start when two years ago and I was like I'd laugh and I'm like why like it's email I'm on YouTube like that's way more valuable or something people are paying sponsors pay so much for newsletters 10 000 people on newsletter you can make 10 20 30k a month if it's like the right quality of people and if you're already creating content like in the united space like you're already thinking about things you're talking to interesting people you already have content down why not shift

32:59some of the content that you're creating in video and like do a summary of that and put it in a newsletter form there's like AI tools that will help you with that you can hire a Ghostwriter to be like here's a two-hour interview I did with the founder of X I think this space is so interesting let's dedicate the month of March to a Weekly Newsletter about that topic and you can get four weeks worth of newsletters just from this one two hour interview and like you're not everyone's gonna watch the Youtube videos not everyone's going to read the newsletter but it's like a very symbiotic relationship of at the bottom

33:27of every newsletter hey follow my YouTube channel at the end of every YouTube video hey subscribe to my newsletter and you just have more touch points of engaging with the audience every Creator needs it whether it's your Tick Tock or Instagram YouTuber you're a business anybody because once you have their email you now own that list of people too if your YouTube gets taken down from breaking a rule you're out of luck but if you have that email list maybe you can build up a new channel and send them your new chat channel so like you have a point of contact with these I mean how devastating would it be if I

33:53mean the YouTube example is one I know like the Montana band for tick tock didn't last very long but hypothetically let's say there's like geopolitical issues and Tick Tock gets shut down 95 of your audience is concentrating on Tick Tock like what now they'll never be able to I know way to find those people again and you didn't own that relationship or have any of the data points on your readers Tick Tock did and the same could be said for Facebook Instagram YouTube and so the difference and like that is like the advantages of email but you really own your audiences direct one-to-one Facebook can shift

34:24their algorithms or Instagram any way that they want where maybe you were getting 100 000 views on your videos but someone at Instagram doesn't like your content or whatever like the algorithm shifts to focus more on community based or maybe they with the upcoming election they want more political based content now your videos are getting significantly less views you have less influence you have no way to get in front of your audience because you don't have a direct relationship with them your only relationship was in Instagram or Tick Tock boosting your videos to their feed but once that goes away there's you're kind of like [ __ ] out of

34:55luck right so it really is like an ultimate hedge of understanding like here's a direct line I have in my audience I can ask them what's your favorite sports team or what content do you want more of or where do you live or whatever and like those data points you're collecting first party data now you understand your audience I think some of the platforms are getting better at surfacing some of that data for the creators but it's also their data 100 it's not exportable like there's not data portability from Tick Tock to YouTube and the the good and bad thing about the business that I operate in is

35:25like complete data portability which is one our advantage to take customers from other platforms because you can export your email list and your data and move it over to beehive it also adds a tremendous amount of stress and pressure because if we ever [ __ ] up we're one export away from going to one of our competitors as well so it's a two-way street but that is also kind of like the beauty of the newsletter space like that's your email list and you can take it wherever you want that's really important and I think people might skip over that but it's very easy for your YouTube account to get banned copyright

35:54claim or you say something they don't like even if it's political they will literally destroy your YouTube account delete it and not let you back on YouTube and you're screwed if you don't have the email so every person every Creator every business should have a newsletter you should do it on beehive there we go e-e-h-i-i-v right yeah you nailed it all right yeah well I've used it yeah yeah and I see it in the link in the URLs all the time which is genius and this is what I want to talk about your product LED growth your viral Loops best in the business 100 because now it's just like

36:24a certain like a critical mass of people and it's just continuing to grow and you recently posted that chart of your growth and so take me to the beginning like once you raise that 2.6 million dollars you want to like bring the product to Market launch it what strategies like do product hunts did you have an email list already built up how did you actually get out there after the waitlist was over have you tried and what were your first like marketing angles and then how has it kind of just grown to the 500k it is now yeah very loaded question yeah there's so many different things let's hit it so

36:56to start one we had our wait list of 500 people so the easiest lowest hanging fruit was hitting up all of them like hey we launched check it out and me just persistently emailing these people and annoying them to move over I'd say maybe 100 of the 500 moved over at some point in like the next three to six months so there was the initial like hey I'm interested in what you're building there was of the 2.6 million we raised social leverage it's actually based in Scottsdale and and uh and San Diego they where like our main lead investor in the seed but we also had about 15 to 20

37:29strategic investors and strategic investors meaning they had an email list they had a large following on Twitter LinkedIn Instagram okay and that was very like [ __ ] Jerry like that team and Grand Bay invested the uh the example I always use is like liquidity the meme account on Instagram and Twitter he had a newsletter of 100 000 people called exact sum that was sending on a different platform and so as investors they're financially incentivized to make sure that we succeed and so they were really our early adopters it sounds so simple and I don't know why more startups don't get at the market like this like why not get investors who are

38:03going to be your early customers because the early customers are by far the hardest to get we launched and our product is the worst it'll ever be like we have it's a very established space it's very competitive and we're a month old right so like we have the least features we'll ever have all of our competitors have 10 times more functionality there's so much more polish the product's good but not Amazing by any means it's going to get better and it has so you really need early adopters that believe in you and like what better than the people who just wrote you like a 100K check to say

38:34like hey in order for this get off the ground we need some early traction so liquidity moved his newsletter of a hundred thousand people from whatever platform he was using before to us we offered more customization we made sure it looked really good we added the referral program we had like polls into it and now his audience of 100 000 people that have been receiving his newsletter for a year plus overnight see a better looking newsletter on a better website with the referral program and like polls like all these features and it's like very noticeable when you start he sends it five days a week when you

39:04start your morning with it every day and it's very different so that's like the first like holy [ __ ] something changed here I wonder what it is and if you scroll down you see at the bottom of the footer which is like the classic growth hacking mechanism of like powered by beehive in the footer of the newsletter and on the website and so you take that 100 000 audience maybe a few percent of them notice that it's now being sent with beehive or people reach out to him like yo newsletter looks a lot better what changed he's like oh I moved over to this new company I miss and beehive

39:31they check it out so that's like how the viral Loop starts and you multiply that by the 10 15 other strategic investors had a large list as well all standing on us plus 100 people on the wait list and that's like the initial like viral Loops that were kind of set into place when we launched intentionality I think that's going to be the catchphrase this podcast because every successful person I talk to has that strategy decided before they launch their product or before they've ever brought on investors you probably had that core idea you guys don't know what I'm talking about literally when you send if you get an if someone has a

40:06newsletter on behive and you send the newsletter to a hundred thousand people if you scroll down to the bottom of the newsletter there's just a link it's a logo that's hyperlinked and it says powered by beehive and so like you said one or two percent of people might get curious be like what is beehive or maybe they're thinking of writing a newsletter themselves so they're looking for how does this person make his newsletter and so there's a very clear Visual and a link that they can get curious and click on be like oh this is a newsletter delivery software and so then they start using beehive because the favorite

40:36newsletter that they read you should be high it's also like one of the more controversial points with our customers because a lot of people want we offer white labeling now but before we'd have like very large customers being like this is my brand I don't want Power by beehive in the footer which is like totally reasonable but I saw all of the data and I knew how valuable it was to have it in there and the second you remove it from One customer even if they're paying like 100 200 extra like it only takes two users to see that click through and convert we've already made that 200 and right so so like I

41:08knew the data of how valuable that was and I made the somewhat um controversial like like stubborn or like arrogant assumption I was like I know our software is better I know yeah and we're so much cheaper so if you if you're that at video breaker if you're that opinionated about like the few people who stroll all the way to the bottom and see that and like plus we're trying to build a cool brand so it's not like a shitty logo with like whatever like it's very small and it's at the very bottom and I think it's a cool brand so I was like fairly arrogant

41:37instead if you want if that's a deal breaker for you I'll let you walk but that means you're going to pay for Worse software that calls them five times as much somewhere else and I made the calculated bet that like yes maybe one in 20 people would not sign with us or would churn because of that but I knew how much growth it was generating for us and I knew that the value prop was strong enough that they'd stick around and most people did but that was like a big point of contention we've since but we needed that to get off the ground right like we hit a point of like bad

42:05escape velocity like most people probably still don't know who we are but we're at a point we have enough foundational growth and people who are using like without white labeled where we can then offer like where you can pay out of it but it took us like 16 months and a lot of people bitching about it to like finally be like I think I've seen an offer like we've we have enough of a brand presence where you can pay your way and white label um but it would like that's another like lesson that I learned is we grew a lot from being active on Twitter and social

42:33media and like as a startup you get so many touch points of customers that like things and don't like things and you have to be very careful of what advice you take the amount of like internal employees who would see like 10 people tweeting like bitching at us like hey like beehive sucks like or like they're great but they won't remove their branding from the newsletter it's a total deal breaker for me like total piece of [ __ ] software like they don't care about their users and like one of our employees would like send me 10 of these tweets and like you have to like

43:01one take that feedback but also be like there's a method to the madness like yeah I know the data and I know that people are allowed and opinionated it's very easy to have like a knee-jerk reaction and be like oh let's just remove it then because these 10 people are really loud but you don't see the 5 000 other people using the software not complaining about it or the 10 or 15 000 accounts that have signed up from the people clicking through and like you have to be very level-headed and and not like a knee-jerk reaction to everything and so like there is a part of like I'm

43:30building this business because I know what's better and like what product works better there's also like I see the data that customers who are complaining don't say and maybe pisses off one person but the ROI is so much greater and like you just have to be very level-headed about you have to have a confidence in your product being so good though so it's kind of like negotiating like we're gonna leave it it's too crucial for our growth this is how our business hits 1000 million dollars so if you don't like it you can leave and we've had plenty of people who are who are like hey this is a deal breaker for

43:59me and I was like okay well you can they name the three other competitors that they were considering and so I go okay competitor a is four times the cost and they don't have XYZ features so you're gonna have to buy these three new softwares combine them together to get the end functionality you're going for and now you're paying 8X the cost same thing for competitor B same thing for competitor C so I lay it out for them and I go I can commit to like considering removing white labeling in the future and offering that I can't promise you but we're keeping it on now and those are your options and I'd say

44:29like nine out of ten looked at their options and chose to stay with us because they have a great product so well yeah it's that was like one of my big takeaways of like early days like you just get so many inputs and being very methodical and data driven about things and not letting emotion take over some of your decision making is like really important and the amount of beehive URLs I see in people's bios now is just so common in my circle and the fact that it makes way more sense because it's really convenient for the solopreneur to just use the quickest domain and it's a beehive domain slash

45:00the name of their newsletter but do they have the optionality to change the domain yeah I mean you could always change the domain yeah like that was like a non-starter so you could always but it makes sense to have it there for the beginner which is a huge win for your company or very and you can pay out of it like 50 a month just because it's like super cheap and do whatever um to double click on like other growth strategies or early days like we had the Strategic investors who were our early adopters and early users which like helped us get off the ground we had the

45:27wait list we've also established ourselves as a company that ships product very quickly and that's very intentional and part of it's because one like we our initial team was me and three Engineers so for technical people and as I said like the product was the we weren't in stealth for five years building like the industry leading product the goal is always to get there but when you first launch like we are the worst product in the market we're the least polished we're lacking all the features that our competitors have so like what you how you get people to trust you is off of like credibility narrative and promising that you're

46:01going to build things that don't yet exist and hoping that they believe you and then doing it and then you have to do it obviously so the The credibility was hey we built this at morning Brew the early adopters proved like look it works and they're having success look at the exact summon liquidities newsletter like it looks better he's getting great feedback the product works I know we're missing these 10 things but we're going to get there and let me prove to you that we can ship product very quickly so I would study what our competitors were missing what people were complaining like this platform doesn't allow you to

46:30do this or I really want to do XYZ and I can't find a solution that does that in my mind it's like okay let's let's start with that if people are already complaining that other competitors don't offer that or that they it's just missing in the market let's focus on building that first that's a great piece of advice right there so we I mean it's just being very active on Twitter and like social and seeing looking at specifically what people are complaining about your competitors and so we would see like competitor X doesn't do these five things like okay that's our road map for the next month let's build those

46:59five things so we like narrow and we build those five things and then we'd be very loud about it so we launched we have like a product announcement email and I'd send out an email to all of our users so I wanted to take product education you're a user of beehive this just launched you should take advantage of it like it didn't exist yesterday and now it exists so it's one educating users but it's two signaling to the market hey if you wanted to do this and you were one of those people complaining that this platform doesn't allow that you can now do that on beehive and

47:27here's like the four other things we just launch too so it's a marketing strategy to show other people that exist that our solution solves a pain point that other competitors don't have so it's both product education and marketing and then people will adopt it and then you just re rinse and repeat so you find I'd say one the things that make our product good but not great and that people are complaining about we prioritize those as features initiatives things that people are complaining about on other platforms that you can't do we prioritize those and just like interesting flashy utility things that either help you grow faster or make more

48:02money are also prioritize and so the combination of those it's like how do we prioritize prioritize building those as quickly as possible we make a huge deal when we do launch them and then rinse wash repeat every two weeks and the narrative then becomes holy [ __ ] they're launching so many value-add features or it also becomes again the uncertainty like the chip on my shoulder of like we didn't have the 15 features that all of our competitors have but if we are known to be shipped shipping so quickly The Narrative sets into people in the market being like they don't have that yet but they ship so quickly they will soon so

48:36if we had one you over as a potential user for nine out of ten things but we were missing that one thing the hope is that you've seen our track record of shipping products so quickly that you know that 10 thing will be there sooner or later and that was all like very very intentional was email your main way of communicating that message to your users or was there a community platform so we started an email to like all the product updates or email but then we post it to Twitter LinkedIn every social platform essentially um that's almost like your content strategy was just constant new feature

49:05new feature new feature explaining why it's good for them so you're educating them providing them value on how to make their job better A lot of them probably don't even know they need that feature but since you've lived it for so long you're educating them with content while also providing it for them yeah I mean again it all comes that's a cool content strategy it all comes from the anxiety of not thinking we're good enough and that will need to we need to prove that we are aware of where we are coming up short and we're actively prioritizing building those features to make them better and we are trying to prove to other

49:38people that we can deliver and when we say this will be live in two months we're gonna do it and we're not like building dumb things we're like really just taking a ton of data points from what people are complaining about and being very realistic with ourselves of where we could be stronger and continuing to build in those areas and so that's been a lot of our growth strategy how many do you have Partners I assume so I have my two co-founders and then our team's like 20 right now 20. oh my God what were your when you chose your partners did they have like complimentary skills or

50:07kind of like why did you choose those Partners or how did you guys come together real quickly yeah so my two co-founders are Ben and Jake so when I was at morning Brew 22 years old I would we needed to hire another engineer and Ben was the first oh somebody I've ever hired in my life so as a special place in my art because like he was so much smarter and more talented than every other person I looked at and he's like a 10x engineer who's so creative oh wow and so I loved working with him how old is he three years younger than me crazy

50:36laugh so really young he's uh 26. um just had a kid yesterday congrats man good man um so after working with him for two and a half years at morning Brew I knew like if I started a company I wanted an engineer like him on my team and then his one of his best friends at school was also an engineer and on my way out of morning Brew we brought in his best friend Jake and so when I went to band I was like Ben you're the smartest person I know like I'm gonna build this company I want you to come and he goes well Jake's the smartest person I know

51:07makes sense so they're actually I wouldn't say like as complimentary like they're both software Engineers I have a technical background but I do more of like the marketing and content and get the market that's really cool okay and they were just available or did they like I mean they they really raised this as a side project while they were working at morning brew and then when we were I mean again like we de-risk this as much as possible yeah well I waited till we had like the term sheet sign and money in the bank before I quit my job and they quit their job to go all in okay so

51:34basically you were at Google working on the side you got your friends to help you on the side then you built this thing in 10 months then you raised so you had like an MVP that was clickable probably working raised off that then launched with strategic investors you literally chose these people based on their ability to help you bring the tool to Market and then you had the viral Loops built in from the start beehive is the domain The Links at the bottom these people started using it and it just started growing from there there was like no more marketing needed I mean there's so many small but like intentional things

52:04we did so like all built on like the insecurities of not having the most built out product it was like the building of the features like that whole initial so this product LED growth is like the big thing is like the term that everyone loves them yeah I'm like it literally like we didn't spend money for the first 12 months on growth it was literally the links and the website in the newsletter and then building a narrative and letting our users know Word of Mouth explain the narrative that you chose so the narrative was one like just the credibility of morning Brewers like the leading news that everyone

52:33knows and the morning Brew in a box the team who built morning Brew is now building my software narrative so credibility is there yeah um if you know nothing else but you look up or you've been reading morning Brew for four years and you joined a company who's launching a newsletter you're like I wanted to emulate morning bro and like the team behind morning Brew just launched this other software platform so that's a narrative the other narrative is what we just talked about which is the product-led growth like we're just going to ship product that I know moves the needle for our users time and time

53:01again so like if you're ever on the let's say you do get pissed off at Boston like hey we need something the hope is in their mind they're oh they don't have this feature or it's not that great but the way you trust the team based on how much we've launched so quickly to date that we're aware that it's not a 10 out of 10 and that we're working on it and if you continue to deliver like that when it keeps the current users happy or believing that the features will come and will get better or it shows to the market that whatever we're missing will come so

53:28that's like the other narrative and then the third narrative is we are so growth focused and with the referral program and the other features that we have a lot of people start a newsletter and then they have success they have five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand subscribers and we have like a very and this was actually not intentional per se but like the pink that we use in like our dashboard chart it's very noticeable and sell the combo and so people started screenshotting organically and just hit 20 000 subscribers screenshot of their chart you see the pink chart and like the Milestone and like one again like

54:02insecure and like I want one I want to support that person so I go that's awesome you hit twenty thousand one it feels amazing as a Founder like you built something on our platform like I made a bunch of bets like I think this feature would be valuable I think people could benefit from this turned out to be right you use them and now you're 20 000 subscribers like that's awesome so I like it and I've retweet it because like that's great I want to support them but what that retweet does then shows other people in my network and their Network like look who's having success on

54:30beehive so it shows people hitting milestones and success and everything that the platform works and then it also shows like oh if I tweet my Milestone Tyler and the Beehive account are gonna like it and retweet it so then it encourages other people to say okay I just hit 10 000 subscribers I'm gonna tweet at Tyler or beehive and show that I hit a milestone so I like and retweet it and like this was like in retrospect very intentional but like in the moment I didn't have like a master plan of like this is how we're gonna do it feels natural I was just like oh that'd be

54:57awesome and like again it feels amazing as a Founder that you took a huge bet and people were benefiting from the software we built so I support them and I retweet it because it looks good for us looks good for them and before you know it every time someone's hitting a milestone which is now like dozens of people a day they're tweeting at us and the narrative that that bill just won the software works that you can grow really quickly and that everyone's moving to beehive because all of these a lot of these people didn't start a newsletter it becomes like the trend in this newsletter Community because they

55:23started on one of our competitors whether it's like a legacy Tech or the other players and they made a conscious decision at some point to leave that and move to us and now they're hitting Milestones so when you put it all together the the innocent bystander on Twitter sees like constant Milestones or like more and more people that launch newsletters on other platforms now having success on us and the narrative is one everyone's moving to beehive to send newsletters and two everyone's having success on beehive and like that company it like people's newsletters are going fast they're on beehive once I realized that like we've also had like

55:58five or six newsletters launched on beehive and get acquired like within a year like milk Road's like probably the biggest example they launched with no subscribers like Ben Levy Sean's partner was like dming me like where to buy a domain like how to set it up and like the DNS stuff so like literally from zero and like of course they have the benefit of having a large podcast distribution but they took that to 250 000 subscribers in 10 months and flipped it for at a good time too for a good time for a good amount of money yeah and that Narrative of you can go from zero

56:29to getting acquired for multiple millions of dollars well and like they didn't build like a custom flashy website like they built they used our website they had our branding on it at the bottom of every single newsletter they never asked the white label it they sent using our custom templates and newsletters they use our referral program led to like 50 000 subscribers of referrals on there like it worked really well there's a total proof of concept that you could come into our software with nothing but an idea execute not get super flashy you don't need like custom websites with videos and nfts and this they just created

57:02content daily and sent it out and had a referral program and they sold it for millions of dollars and so that's the big one I mean that shows they were the perfect time like the crypto Bull Run for sure every like perfect variable came together now ai is doing the same thing for you now we have a ton of things we can do every single year with every new trend but but we have so many I think we have up to about 10 newsletters that started on us and have since been acquired none as big as milk road but like college students who are making like fifty thousand dollars

57:30during finalization ton of money and they were already making money through sponsorships as they were building and then they got an acquisition of like 50k and they're like a junior in college and one I think it shows the power of the newsletter economy it's a huge proof of concept for us um but we've built that narrative as well so like right nerd I think we've had like eight or nine people get Acquired and I just tweet I like retweet the story with like the commentary of like can't believe another newsletter on beehive got acquired I do not do sponsors on this podcast so if you do

57:57learn something the only thing I ask is that you send the link of this episode to a friend if anyone wasn't clear on what he's talking about when you have like you load your beehive account and they have like this trademark like pink and blue like line chart of your growth so you have like 1 000 subscribers the first month 5 000 this month so it's like a line graph and people will screenshot that and put that on Twitter and then he'll retweet it and share it and like cultivates this little community and this concept of sharing your growth and if you see that as a

58:25viewer you start associating that to beehive and it's also it shows you like the power of distribution like I'm doing this when I start I think I like 2 000 followers on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it um I still I think of like 13 000 now it's like I'm not massive but if you were to deploy this strategy with a significantly larger follower like base like that's incredible right so that but that's why when you're talking about like as you're scrolling through Twitter everything you see is like another person launching a newsletter like I feel like I live on such a bubble of

58:54people hitting Milestones on beehive and like newsletters that are launching and making money and whatever um but it makes you think of like where else can we deploy this strategy to build narratives on tick tock on YouTube on Instagram um because like yes I'm sure there's like a pretty strong overlap of like Twitter people who are active on Twitter and people with newsletters um but I feel like it's like fairly limiting and we're like in the early stages of deploying that now oh yeah and content and it's really probably only in America like yeah and globally I can't even imagine what's to come so yeah and

59:23we do support a bunch of different internet that's cool all the different languages that you guys have I listen I heard that another podcast that was a really cool idea but the referral program is something that you guys are like kind of known for and trademarked so I have two questions on this do you want to kind of explain how yours works because I know it's like only kind of for people that are also on your platform in a way because not necessarily the referral program to help people grow their newsletter that's pretty obvious but kind of like that I forgot what you called it I'm so sorry

59:51but when I have a newsletter they're like a recommendations yeah yeah yeah so I can walk which one do you want me to walk through all of them sure referring how you came up with them and then what they do yeah so the referral program going back to morning Brew very simply put is you are incentivized as a reader to share the newsletter with other people so you read morning Brew you think it's great you share with your colleague at work and then you get like stickers or like a premium newsletter or like a t-shirt so is it credits or is it literally like it's like referral credit

1:00:22so if I shared it with my three co-workers with like my unique link I get three credits and I can like redeem whatever like a milestone it's like a coffee mug and so that is what led to when I was at morning Brew over a million subscribers it's basically saying like I already have a loyal audience how can I make them share it where I don't have to like pay for growth Facebook and Instagram they're gonna tell their friend family mom dad whatever um so we basically built that as a growth engine that anyone on beehive can say at these different Milestones will offer these different rewards we don't

1:00:55do the Fulfillment we have like fulfillment Partners if you want to but it's like like the basic Foundation of being able to offer that as a growth strategy for your newsletter so that's like one growth strategy so if someone sends the newsletter and their friend signs up with their link they get a point and they can use that point to buy or get a free mug yeah or the point could be like a PDF like what worked really for for Elk Road going back to them at one referral you got a PDF explaining what like the top 10 crypto experts think about the market going into 2022 and I guess someone who signed

1:01:23up for milk Road like you're interested in crypto you obviously are probably investing in crypto in some capacity so for one referral to now get what pen experts are telling you what to invest in like I'd share it with someone for that yeah and so your friends are probably interested in if they're your friends and what super advantageous for milk Road and any of these newsletters is like the digital products like a PDF like doesn't cost money to fulfill so morning Brew was like on one end of the spectrum where they were shipping mugs t-shirts crew necks whatever like it works and like it backs into a lot of

1:01:53ice that's like but we had interns at NYU and now I think they like have like a fulfillment center that actually does all of that like physical Logistics is like a whole thing anyway that's the referral program um the other thing that we did at morning Brew was we would find other newsletters that had a similar audience demographic and say promote morning brew and we'll promote you it's like we'd be like hey we're each 50 000 subscribers big it's like a free ad say I start my day with morning Brew we'll plug your newsletter we each grow from this it costs zero dollars I mean we each get

1:02:22like four or five thousand subscribers like that's a cross promotion basically it's a cross promotion so then and then morning Brew grew bigger and bigger and we'd be like five times the size and it was like our cross promotion but they'd plug us five times we plug them once so we we did that game over and over again and so it was always our game plan to launch a cross promotion Network where you can find other newsletters that have a similar audience demographic but maybe not the same overlaps maybe there's like a two percent overlap so you're hitting net new people and you just want to it's like a free house

1:02:52that it's a cross promotion so the recommendation network is basically that you can find newsletters based on content category based on size based on audience overlap and say I like these three crypto newsletters so I'm going to recommend them as well the hope is that they see that they are drive or you're driving subscribers to them and like one click they can send subscribers back to you so it's really just one big cross promotion Network um so that's like step one of like another growth mechanism like free to use on the platform and like you build like bubbles so a lot where it works best is five newsletters who are all

1:03:28like medium to large all promote each other and they all go viral on LinkedIn or Twitter and like they're the first to know that someone else in their pod is going viral because as soon as one person has a viral tweet and then in the links it's signed up to my newsletter thousands of people signed up for their newsletter and through the recommendation Network those other three newsletters that he's recommending are now getting hundreds of subscribers for free and it's just one click it's just it's one click talking win and so that's like the network effects of building a little pod and being able to grow for

1:04:00free and again like it all goes back to morning Brew like we saw the cross promotion Network working these are the details that show that you like know this Niche industry so well where the MailChimp to the clavio might Overlook it like there's like trying to send emails whether you're for a company it's for a drip campaign it's a newsletter it all works we're like this is for newsletters this is for growth if someone reads this newsletter about AI they're probably going to like these others so let's let them cut deals where anytime someone subscribes to your newsletter they have an agreement where you put your email here if you like our

1:04:29newsletter you'll probably like these three would you like to subscribe yes yes yes now everybody's getting a new subscriber a lot of people are only subscribing after they follow this person on Twitter or LinkedIn for a while so they already like their content exactly and they trusted so you've already you've been following this person on Twitter for Monte just launched a newsletter you trust their recommendation they recommend three other newsletters in that content space you're probably going to opt into them and now it's a free growth mechanism and that's like where the credibility and experience of what we built at morning Brew comes into play because I knew that

1:05:00cross promotions were like an incredible growth channel for morning Brew for a while where we didn't have to pay for growth and I also knew what newsletters we were looking at what we were looking like is it size is it open rate is it audience demographic and building that directly into the product is something like oh we want to send emails like there's a big difference between we want to send emails and we know what it takes to build a newsletter of three million people and like it's the trial and error that we've done cross promotion for years and built that Network that made it a no-brainer to build it into our

1:05:30product this is going to be taking cross-promotion to the extreme and anyone that reads a newsletter only has so much time in the morning so much attention and so if they subscribe to five newsletters you're almost giving your newsletter subscribers to your competitor in a way because if they start making a better product than you this person can only spend 20 minutes reading in the morning they stop reading your newsletter so I've always because we've done this before yeah and it seems like there's a balance like you don't want to overdo it you don't want to underdo it but there's definitely value there so what's your

1:06:00counter argument to that or what's your opinion on that I mean I think everyone's always worried about saturation capacity one is you're usually pretty strategic of who you're recommending so if it's the exact same audience and it's like a competing newsletter most people like we would never at morning Brew do a cross promotion with like the hustle oh they were like our big competitors like Nisha Jason it's it's like we're kind of targeting the same people but you're writing about emerging technology and we're writing about AI prompts gotcha so it's not like a one-to-one comparison and if and a lot of times it's like hey we do twice a week and you do weekly or

1:06:33like you kind of like I mean you pick and choose who you want to promote and so I think most people are Savvy enough not to choose like a competitor to saturate their own audience um so that's like the main counter argument but it's like up to you in general like who you're recommending um there's a very real hustle of like starting a newsletter or starting five newsletters in different Industries running them up to 100 000 people and then selling them like for hundreds of thousands of dollars so have you seen since you've been so deep in this and I'm just so new I always wondered now

1:07:03that these tools exist and they're so easy to be Hive does that lower the average value of a newsletter because they they can grow more quickly but then that retention or the churn is a little higher the retention's lower turns higher because you can get them easier from that Network yeah I get what you're saying it because like because morning Brew sold for four million or had four million subscribers sold for 75 yeah and hustle sold over 25 million with a few million subscribers so does that now like what is the kpi you're almost saying like it's becoming so easy to grow it almost feels like a cheat code

1:07:39like you might go from zero to 100K subscribers and are those 100K subscribers as valuable and engage right as it was in like the olden days where you were like hustling and spending a ton of money and converting people and there wasn't all of these growth exactly I get what you're saying I haven't seen like a depreciation in like the worth of a newsletter yet I can see like it maybe getting there where if you're just cross-promoting the same readers or watch the same newsletters I'd also say like we have like body newsletters at that point yeah I think what uh I don't want to misquote how many unique readers

1:08:13we have um yeah I'm completely blind you guys have all that data too yeah yeah so I'm gonna like some unique emails that we have across the ecosystem and it's a lot right so it's not that yes I think we live in the small bubble of like this AI newsletter is now promoting this AI prompts newsletter which is promoting this like emerging technology newsletter the internet's so big and there's so many unique content categories of like here's how you find freelance writing jobs in in the midwest or like there's so many different newsletters and content categories that exist that in our small bubble I think there's a lot

1:08:48of the same readers that have the same information died of I read these five newsletters where you might see like a diminished that are perceived diminished value but in the grand scheme of things we have so many unique readers that are reading different types of content where I don't think we've hit that point yet but I think it's a good point to call out like it just feels like functionally it's a huge PL benefit and it's on the owner of the newsletter to make due diligence there but I can see people like as all people do they take things to the extreme where they could just

1:09:16kind of like abuse it to try to run up and get a valuation so how did I don't know if you know this but for morning Brew like how did they choose 75 million like it's not just off 4 million subscribers it's more through is it more so about like open rate click through rate and then sponsorship revenue or like did they ever have internal products that they sold themselves and it's that Revenue they can't just be off of number of subscribers yeah I mean there's definitely like a REV they were large enough for like the revenue multiple was like a normal like I don't know two to four x Revenue okay so just

1:09:45also like caveat I was not involved with anything talks at all like I left without even knowing that they were going to get acquired so that was news to me when I woke up like by a second we got Google right and I was like holy [ __ ] morning Brew just got acquired that's kind of cool um but uh yes I don't know like the whole negotiation but they were making enough Revenue in the scale of like probably between 10 and 20 million where you can see the growth trajectory and get like a normal evaluation so it's more so about the revenue the company's making and not the for sure number it's

1:10:12if you're not monetizing yet to go to a company and unless like so a great example like I think the hustle acquisition is so smart because they have a very particular demographic of readers and if your hubs spot and you're spending so much money on like so with media and data acquisition to have a daily newsletter that people have built a habit around and have a brand Association and instead of promote whatever for advertising Revenue just promote HubSpot because it's a large enterprise software solution that almost all has 10 conversions a week and they're Roi positive and like they can keep scaling so like I love that that

1:10:47makes so much sense that might be so that if you are that type of acquirer like it's probably a different equation for you where Revenue doesn't actually matter as much it's how engaged is the audience how large is the audience what's the growth trajectory does that fit into my business and if I'm a emerging AI business I just need people to adopt my product and there's like a milk Road equivalent in AI then it's like okay here's a brand that people trust there's a habit because they read it every single morning Monday through Friday and instead of Shilling other AI products now they're only pushing people down funnel into our

1:11:22product and then like I don't give a [ __ ] how much money they're making I just want that database and I want to continue to grow if you have the context but if you're a media play then it's probably Revenue right it's right if I'm paying a million dollars for this media asset because it's making a hundred thousand dollars a year I think in three years we'll be making more than a mill to Mill it's just sponsors CPM whatever that's why newsletters are so powerful it doesn't always have to be sponsorship it could be pushing people into a paid Community right well maybe we have if

1:11:50we're a product management newsletter we can have a slack Channel or a Discord of 50 of the top PMS at Google Uber Facebook meta Snapchat whatever and you can learn weekly from these webinars or like whatever it is any type of funnel like the emails are the ultimate top of funnel and to have a product whether it's like a paid community that people pay 99 dollars a month to be a part of a slack Channel like if you have a hundred thousand people reading your newsletter and Trust what you say the conversion rate of a few percent paying you 99 a month for a community is like a pretty

1:12:22great business so that's why I think so many solopreneurs inside projects have been born of email it all starts with creating amazing content but if you can create good content and people are engaged people are sharing people are actively reading what you do with that you don't need to know day one but year one year two you can launch communities you can do paid subscriptions you can do sponsorships you can do affiliates so there's what are the different types of newsletters that you've seen like so it's like sponsorships then you like have your own products that you could sell through the newsletter then you have affiliate links promoting

1:12:54other people's which are kind of just like what you can do which are like bottom left yeah that's the other thing too it's not mutually exclusive like you could launch a paid newsletter where people pay you ten dollars a month for like a bonus issue weekly for example but you could also have ads on The Daily newsletters as well like they're not mutually exclusive and so where subsack made the big bet of we like I think it sounds great to say you can own your audience like don't be reliant on ad dollars it's very cyclical you could you have this direct relationship with your readers already why not charge them 10

1:13:2515 20 a month for premium content that is a higher level of quality or has additional insights which I think is great and if you can warrant that like I paid 12 a month to Ben Thompson's for techery and I think it's great and I get value out of that I think a lot of content creators found out that one it's very difficult you're the right really really good content it has to be good and can't be found right like it's really hard to like morning brew and a lot of these other popular newsletters aggregate news around the internet and their value prop is you don't have to

1:13:56read 20 different business sources all dialogue curating yeah you're trusting our editors to compile and aggregate the most important topics of the day or of the week and break it down in consumable bits that are interesting to read and that's great but are people willing to pay for that I'd say most likely not for like an aggregator type newsletter so then it goes into like more expert analysis or inside tips whether it's like stock trading or crypto news or like other Alpha you can get or just like really good entertainment that you would pay for kind of like a Netflix but it's kind of harder to do that I haven't

1:14:31seen that played as well that's interesting I think a lot of people default to substack before beehive existed because it was easier to understand oh I can charge 10 bucks a month for this newsletter and make money same time only fans got very popular patreon it's it's the whole narrative in the market patreon yeah own your audience charge like why Chase ad dollars you can charge your readers who already love you and depend on your content to pay you 5 10 15 20 a month it makes perfect sense for what you've [ __ ] with art Hulu what you've seen with Netflix what you've seen with

1:15:01Disney is all of the direct subscription businesses are now offering advertising as well because one subscription is tough and advertised like where there are companies who want new customers which is everyone there's an advertising business to be had and that's what all these businesses are starting to realize and that's where a lot of content creators and newsletters understand that it's a lot of work to create a premium subscription offer not to be differentiated it has to be quality and I have to constantly annoy my audience who upsell them to pay for my premium newsletter but advertising granted it's a whole nother Beast that a lot of them

1:15:36don't want to deal with but if you can get advertising dollars you skip a lot of that it has been the biggest headache for us running the newsletter there was like no system you have to manage like how do you find people that want to sponsor your newsletter your newsletter ours has only been out for like five months we have like 70 000 people on it how much do we charge charge for sponsorship how do we find these legitimate companies to sponsor we don't want to sponsor a scam you have to vet them you have to handle 15 conversations at once you have to schedule out which

1:16:01sponsor goes out one day it's a so much work but I think beehive is about to change that and this is why I think that it's super probably the most valuable thing that I've heard you say is you guys are trying to make the Facebook ads platform of newsletters because as a solo Creator you don't want to deal with all that I just mentioned for finding sponsors but at the same time they don't have to worry about churn you don't have to worry about pissing off your audience you're not pushing anything on them so they still trust you you can offer the newsletter for free so as many people

1:16:28can read it but you just have a sponsor here to pay the bills for you so go into what I think is going to be the most groundbreaking aspect of beehive is your ad Network I'd like to take a step back morningbrew made their 15 to 20 million when they sold off of AD dollars so the hustle was entirely at I think they had Trends as well but primarily ad based axios ad base so a lot of these newsletters that you are familiar with and have went on to sell were Advertising based newsletters and that's where a lot of the dollars go in content and media in general and so I think you

1:16:58did a pretty good job of painting the pain points of as a publisher or newsletter writer where do you go to find sponsorships do you actually understand your audience like who they are what's the demographic what are they more likely to click on what ads are they interested in so there's like audience development data that you need to do you need to then find what brands they align with what fits with your brand who's the right person to get in contact with at these different brands how do you price your newsletter what are the expected results and then you have to do the reporting the invoice

1:17:27saying like it's a full operation it's why this sales and brand Partnerships team at morning Brew was the largest team because there's so many moving parts to that so I think the pain points on the newsletter side is pretty straightforward you want to create a newsletter because you're creative you're ambitious you are good and interested in writing about something you didn't create a newsletter to sell brand sponsorships and so that's like the pain point on that side on the other side as the brand and The Advertiser let's say you have a large advertising budget and you're advertising on Facebook Instagram Snapchat Google YouTube like the typical

1:18:00digital ad platforms um you now want to experiment with newsletters you've done a few newsletter buys it works really well let's say you're targeting women in their 30s you find a massive newsletter like the scam who targets that demographic you pay them one up front like I'd say a hundred thousand dollars to run a single newsletter send because and it's a big risk it's like an all-in-one like I am purchasing a single send maybe it just so happens that day that the story above or below it is so engaging it actually takes away clicks from me um as The Advertiser maybe the newsletter flops maybe the open rate

1:18:34sounds like there's a lot of risk involved with putting a lot of upfront Capital into a single newsletter send and those are like the downsides let's say the upside it goes great and you want to advertise again in that newsletter they might be booked up and like you can't get another placement for another two months you're like okay I found a newsletter that was primarily women in their 30s it converted really well we can't run in that newsletter for another two months and it might after we run it two three four times get saturated with that exact same audience so then your problem becomes where are

1:19:04there other newsletter letters that are similar to that and so where do you look for these newsletters so now you're like Googling what newsletters do women in their 30s read what are newsletters similar to the scam and now you have a list of like 15 to 20 different newsletters I have to find the people at those newsletters but I haven't thought about hey are you accepting advertising I haven't seen an advertisement in your newsletter would you be open to that um let's get in contact with the right person so much Outreach so you're like now there's someone on that marketing team that is doing all this Outreach to

1:19:34newsletters and then when you get in contact with the newsletter like you're like you're just trusting their data of you're like okay so like how they lie how big is your newsletter they go like 100k and like okay well like what's the open rate like I don't know like is it unique opens is it total opened do you trust their data do you ask them for like a screenshot of like hey let me see your dashboard Photoshop how how actually how big is your newsletter what's your open rate what's your clicking rate and then you also ask like who's your audience and to be honest like email's so opaque it's just like an

1:20:03email someone gmail.com they don't know who Their audience is at all so you're trusting these random newsletters that you found on a Google search that have a similar demographic Maybe and you're trusting their numbers Their audience and and there's only so many that you're going to find so it's very manual so as The Advertiser which I think actually might be the bigger pain point is if I know that I want to advertise and diversify away from meta Facebook Google and newsletters have worked really well for us because newsletters are typically very Niche audiences where you trust the person you've been following them on Twitter you follow their you follow them on

1:20:38social you sign up to their newsletter you trust the products that they're putting in the newsletter that's why it performs really well and now you want to get in front of a bunch of different newsletters where do you go to do that and the solution would be on our platform saying you want to put a hundred thousand dollars and rather than it being one big newsletter buy we would actually diversify your spend across like 30 different newsletters we have all the first party data of who the subscribers are what they've clicked on historically so we know that this person always clicks on CNBC and Yahoo finance

1:21:08links so they're interested in finance and investing they also click on NBA link so they're interested in NBA and a bunch of like right-leaning politics stuff so they're like a republican that's interested in the NBA and investing and with their IP address and location like are located in the Northeast so now we have like a huge like customer profile on these different readers because I would never see that if someone subscribed to my newsletter all I know is that person is subscribed to my newsletter but since they're subscribed to my newsletter onto your platform you can see what other newsletters they're also subscribed to on your platform so using our platform

1:21:38you can collect data yourself and you do see like location data you see like if you ask them their favorite sports team like that's data that you own you can export it you can see that on charts what you can see is what the other newsletters on our platform are collecting so we kind of have like that would benefit us because now we know who your audience has been outside of you so we can get you better advertisers and better rate and they'll perform better so they'll keep dishing you more money and so now what we've solved is the pain point of newsletters where you don't

1:22:06have to go out and go to like the 15 brands that you think might advertise in your newsletter and then pitch them on your newsletter and spend a ton of time doing that because it's a total pain in the ass it's like YouTube for you like my work we're dishing you ads we're saying you're creating our newsletter you have five open ad opportunities here's the five advertisers here's the copy which one do you like the most and you'll get paid approximately 2 000 for that 1500 for that whatever and you choose which one aligns with you the most and you pick it and there's no obligation or contract like you don't

1:22:36need to promise US that you're going to run these ads so that is totally up to you and that you also might have your own brand deals where you have your own Advertiser and you can say no to all of ours and make more money with your own and that's totally fine like we are in the camp of we want our newsletters to make as much money as possible and grow as fast as possible and whether you use our ads or your own ads whatever you want to do like we're in favor of helping you do that it's there if you want it and it's there if you want it

1:23:01and if you don't want it don't take it and then on the flip side as an Advertiser you can get front of thousands tens of thousands of the top newsletters in the world and be placed because of first party data and it's just like you're hitting a long tail of content creators like you'll hit newsletters that maybe have 500 subscribers that you have no business even going to that because it's too small for you but if we hit 30 newsletters or 500 subscribers it actually adds up to Impressions I can move the needle yeah because all you care about it doesn't matter you don't care if it's just one newsletter 500 you

1:23:34just want 30 000 and press one thirty thousand depression is a dense audience of 500 people so and you can go to a newsletter of 30 000 subscribers which might convert okay but what if there's like at 60 newsletters of 500 subscribers super dense really like passionate audiences that are going to convert so much higher like and it'll perform so much better for the advertiser but it's just too much of a time commitment for any yeah you've never ordered to do at any of this thirty dollars so like if done right there's like a lot of Big Data play and there's like a lot of filters and functionality to be built

1:24:08but if done right it really is a win-win-win for the advertisers to hit audiences that are very engaged at scale for newsletters to get monetized and make money without having a sales team without having to deal with the copy Creation The Branding the the invoicing the reporting and then a win for us obviously because we're building this Marketplace rip to newsletter ad agencies or it becomes like way more available to be a newsletter Ad Agency it's like a Facebook Ad Agency now right like we would ideally like the newsletter agencies ad agencies would be a customer of ours and bring their clients on and it makes their job so much easier right

1:24:47um so so much like a Facebook ad manager agency as well I don't like I think that is the most genius thing possible in the space has anyone ever tried it before so no is audible I'll say a few things there is traditional pixel based ad networks that exist in email that are really shitty banner ads well you have UTM links where people can track the conversion rates like so a vegetable Go full funnel have pixels on like the different advertisers website and actually track conversion of everything so like when I say like Facebook ad manager for literally letters like that is where we're going on like the

1:25:23five-year Horizon um there's been players that have banner ads and email newsletters that don't convert well and it costs pennies and those have been around for a while that being said multi-billion dollar businesses like there's a lot of money there like there's a lot of emails being sent in the world and they're so low effort they drop in a pixel and now you're monetizing and you don't have to deal with anything as the newsletter um so that exists um but like data is very limited right like we own the entire ecosystem from where the content creators are creating content to where the data is populating because of what's who's opening who's

1:25:56clicking who was saying that their favorite sports league is the NBA like we have all of the data end to end so we're in like a very unique position to do that um so there are like players and like the email ad space that I've taken an agnostic view with pixel based um banner ads and then there's a few competitors that have experimented since I have been talking about this and saying that this is what we're building that they have tried that like um good for you but the different Advantage is like this has been the game plan yeah so we were collecting data and building tools and infrastructure day

1:26:31one knowing that the ad network was always the end play if you were to ask me it sounds like a lot less sexier but like as a capitalist probably more optimistic of like day one we're building the largest and network in email but like how do you get there and how do you make it the most beneficial to newsletters and advertisers is I think you have to own the system end and not just be a pixel based 100 so how do you get there you have to build the best newsletter platform where it attracts all the top newsletters to use your software so it is like a very

1:26:59intentional stepwise process of saying like in order to build the biggest newsletter ad Network that exists you need to have billions of Impressions and emails being sent which means you need to have tens of thousands of the top and largest newsletters using your software which means you need to build all the Kick-Ass features that attract people to grow and monetize on your platform to have newsletters move over to then monetize those assets so it's like kind of like playing chess in a way but like that was always the end goal and we're still executing like the first inning of just building like the core foundational Tech that attracts

1:27:36newsletters to launch and start on our platform words can describe how smart I think that is and how needed it is because sponsorships are a better they're better for the audience because you can grow make the free newsletter you get as many people to get free value and it's just a sponsored post that people are used to but the pain Point has always been organizing for the everyday person is not an entrepreneur now you don't need to make a product you don't need to charge 10 bucks your newsletter which people churn out of or it loses trust with your audience unless you're like specifically detailed and so if you

1:28:05could literally just take out that whole pain point of having to organize ads for the newsletter side genius and on from the ad side equally as convenient and so you had that planned from the start and so it was literally your first plan was like I guess it's phase it's phase one launch with core functionality and a referral program the referral programs are Advantage Plus easy to sign up and viral Loops that'll lead to product-led growth then you're going to add the boosts the boosts yeah add the Boost make the product better grow a community engage with the community deliver on your promises constantly iterate or

1:28:37constantly uh develop new features and then let them know every single week share their progress what is it uh celebrate their success and then ultimately once you have enough users you have that critical mass of people you have the data of all the people signing up then you have this custom Facebook ads and that's an hour you know 19 months in we're doing 400 million impressions a month and like that's enough to turn to an Advertiser or like an agency and say we have some of the top Publishers content creators influencers in the world in AI crypto Fashion sports politics if that's an audience that you

1:29:16want to get in front of you could do it internally manually yeah that we are doing it manually to start and so to date I mean this will change very soon but to date like you can run an ad agency without the tech so we know our top we have all the data we know who our top newsletters are we know their conversion rates we know their click-through rate we know what advertisers and advertisements that perform better historically and so we don't need the tech per se to be built day one and it also allows us the wiggle room to learn from like what the newsletters want what pain points they

1:29:48have when inserting the ad what the agencies and advertisers are looking for so it really is like building the plane while you're flying it in the sense of like why go ahead heads down and build the entire infrastructure intact that I just described like super tight when we can like build like the core Foundation then do it manually for a bit see what advertisers want so like hey we really need this data or like this is the demographic data that moves the needle for us or we need real-time reporting and then it's like okay well we haven't invested in wasted time building XYZ off the wrong assumptions now that we have

1:30:19this feedback we're going to spend the next month building that and I'd say we're I mean Ben just had a kid yesterday so we're well delayed but the goal would be in the next month or so to roll out like in platform ad opportunities and like really make it real okay you are creating like a new make money online opportunity and this is like kind of what my audience and my world is on YouTube is a newsletter Ad Agency if you're listening to this you're a 16 22 year old kid hustling looking for a way to make money online go learn beehive and learn how to make beehive

1:30:51ads for newsletters everyone is talking about Facebook ads everybody's talking about social media marketing you've probably never heard of newsletter ads we run a newsletter our ads are making us a lot of money these companies are selling for hundreds of millions of dollars so if you can figure out how to run ads on newsletters on their Network now that's going to be a huge agency opportunity where you're just connecting advertisers to newsletters you can convince YouTubers to make a newsletter say it's going to make you an extra five thousand dollars a month and then set up and run their ads manager for their newsletter and you

1:31:23can take a cut of that or charge a monthly retainer I've never thought about that that is so so cool I mean that's also been one of the coolest things in this journey of seeing businesses built off of our business around your ecosystem so we now have a lot of agencies specific to beehive that help you set up your behive account build your landing page build your newsletter automated we have like Pro strategy so someone who knows okay I can run Facebook and Instagram ads for your newsletter but I can also tie that in with the recommendation I know which newsletters are better for recommendations we can put a little

1:31:54budget into the Boost network we can put some budget into this we can have like SEO optimized content we can have a pop-up form and email gate certain posts we can drive traffic to that and like by really knowing the content ecosystem and all the tools that we've built like we have hit the point which I knew we would get is where we're almost too feature Rich we're like a nuclear it becomes like a little overwhelming you're like that's how I felt so we're built we're building my sources now we're building like a beehive 101 resource where we got a lot of good ones though like the core

1:32:23function it's a little convoluted like we have a YouTube channel yeah we have a Blog we have zendesk articles like we have a knowledge base but we don't have like a here's everything you would need to know and you can pick and choose what you want to learn outside of like the YouTube tutorials we also ship too quickly where the YouTube tutorials like the UI goes out of date in like two months like we completely revamped the page so we're building a beehive 101 resource but I say that because now we offer so much which is great so when people are like hey can you do X on

1:32:51beehive the answer used to be no to nine out of 10 things now it's yes to nine out of 10 things which is great and empowering and allows people to launch more products and features but it also means to the new users it's very overwhelming and so we now have businesses and agencies built on top of beehive that we are either somewhat associated with or not at all or they'll help you grow in the on beehive they'll help you set up better looking newsletters templates websites newsletter growth agency would be or a great business isn't that didn't you guys just part of the guy that rare Gary

1:33:24yeah so we just that's like our first it's like a partnership and he does growth in ads and he worked with bike the milk Road and a bunch of other content creators but there's also like just setting up my account to make sure it works well there's like customizing the newsletter template there's customizing the website and then there's growth there's design there's there's so many different components of what you're building here and there's like an agency opportunity to specialize in either all of them or in any individual vertical that's so smart because we're like literally I keep saying it but we started our newsletter five months ago and we've

1:33:54been running Facebook ads we did Facebook ads for like our whole life and so we're like getting 75 signups and just killing it over there and then we're just learning all these different ways to Market newsletters and grow them and I think this is our first month of doing sponsors and we have like 12K lined up for the first month yeah and so anybody you can just go to a YouTuber like me we just happen to know what we're doing but most YouTubers don't go to someone like me say hey we'll start you a newsletter we'll make you an extra based on your audience I bet you get 50

1:34:20000 people we'll make you an extra ten thousand dollars this month and don't do anything it was also a huge business for like ghost writing yeah and YouTubers who just are like like someone who's a YouTuber and amazing at creating like five minute videos that are super entertaining and they're like I don't give a [ __ ] about writing like that's not my skill set but I have a million Subs drivers on YouTube I bet you I can convert five to ten percent of them to a newsletter and now you're saying I can monetize on my YouTube channel like automatically with like the AdSense but I could also make 10K 12K a

1:34:51month on my email newsletter why not spend 3K in a ghost writing service who will do like a done-for-you newsletter we'll write it we'll do the Beehive we'll grow it and we'll get the sponsors for you easy and so I think that's a huge opportunity yeah and it was like a creative agency play too they get the sign off of the Creator the creators like okay this content works for me it fits by brand it's but it's based off of the content I'm already creating on YouTube they sign off you get some trust back and forth and now you basically have a newsletter in a box that you're

1:35:20making 15 20 25k a month on and you're paying the service and the agency 5K it's a no-brainer you're immediately adding value making the money they didn't know existed like I never thought a newsletter would be a real thing I would do six months ago and but what they also don't realize so it's like as that newsletter gets better and better and scales you're gonna get people in the newsletter ecosystem that aren't even an owner you YouTube ecosystem and at the bottom of every nice letter when you're like hey subscribe to my YouTube channel now your YouTube channel is you're cross-pollinating so that's like the Real Money Maker that I think we're

1:35:50about to enter in with a few different Partnerships it's got so much energy that just got me so excited I've been making all these videos on like AI automation agencies but now I'm gonna make one on newsletter agencies guys I'm just trying to show you opportunities but this is great I've never thought about that and that's like makes so much sense because you immediately make them more money and then grow Their audience it makes so much sense so wow fantastic business you asked your brother I looked pretty cool pretty cool [ __ ] um but I do want to ask you what makes the business work like

1:36:18how like the software tools you guys are using internally how are you actually like operating the business so we're 100 remote which is I I'm a huge fan I I used to be such an office person like morning Brew day is I love going in love the cold brew love talking to people love socializing love happy hour and I was the grumpiest person in the world when like coveted first hit off because I was like in New York tiny apartment did you have a place to work I was like working on my couch with my computer on my lap and now I flip to the 180 where I

1:36:47can't imagine spending any time commuting I wake up I go to the gym I come back and I'm at my desk working from like 8 A.M to 10 p.m and I don't know if everyone on the team is working to that extent but the fact that we can hire Talent from around the world we have engineers in the Netherlands we have people in India Canada Mexico Colombia so we have a global team um we're 20 now we're primarily engineering and we have like a pretty well oiled machine I'd say um because like we've been so in intentional about strategy and the one thing that I think I do pretty well as a

1:37:23leader is very very um very transparent communication and so everyone's on the exact same page of this is what's working really well this is where we're kind of shooting the bed in the business this needs to get a lot better and here's like our vision for the next quarter for the next month for the next week and we all are rowing in the exact same direction and it's been like a huge part of the success it's really hiring talented people and having us all on the same page everyone's in their own workplace everyone's comfortable everyone's hustling everyone's balled in I think most companies are stuck in

1:37:58their ways or most new companies see how other companies are around so they think that's how they have to do it you have to have an office you have to have everybody here but it makes way more sense to just hire in any country this person's skill good at the job doesn't matter about time zones you have zoom you just have a Trello board or whatever to list out your Sprints and everyone's on the same page like there is no real reason I think it's so archaic to think that we're gonna have an office in Los Angeles everyone has to and they hire people in LA or we would

1:38:25not be anywhere where we are If I Only Had Talent from Los Angeles you're like actually at a disadvantage because you have to overpay people you have to pay to move them there and then you have way more in my opinion it's going to cause like human problems so you have more need for management in like 80. chart we just brought on our first agent yeah person but like that was like higher 20 right so like I don't know as a remote I mean there's a lot of things that need to be done with HR in terms like for sure all in processing it's not onboarding and recruiting which I'm now

1:38:48learning now how much I was like had on my plate that I shouldn't have um but yeah I mean I I fundamental and just because I've only had so many jobs but I think like having paying someone to relocate to a different city and like uprooting like their spouse's job and like kids and schools and everything is like the craziest concept not to mention just like requiring people like limiting your talent pool to a single location that can drive to an office that you're now paying for this office as well like I sound like such a millennial talking like this but yeah I fundamentally cannot does apprehend why anyone would

1:39:23choose something differently I talk to other startups and entrepreneurs who are building companies and they always like how do you how do you know people are getting [ __ ] done I was like well one everything's very everything's very Performance Based right like I think a lot of it stems from the fact that we are engineering based and so here's the expectations of the few weeks like this feature does not exist today it needs to Exist by the end of the week and this person's task to get it done and it either gets done or it doesn't and if someone continues to not get something done it's very obvious we do daily

1:39:51stand-ups so you say what you've been working on and you say what you're working on today and it becomes very apparent when someone isn't pulling their weight and when the team is so high caliber and everyone else is pulling their weight I think like human psychology like you don't want to be the person who should stand up and be like obviously didn't get much done yesterday and like like get this done today whether you're in person or online right I've made sense like 30 years ago you could literally only do a one-to-one phone call with a telephone that was connected to your wall like you had so

1:40:18like it made sense to pay someone 20 grand that's talented to move out there and they would operate their family they're being busy with getting [ __ ] done and like that's the big difference too like we have an expectation of by the end of this Sprint or the end of this week these things that don't yet exist are going to exist and here's who's going to do them and like there's no excuses like that is what's go that is the output of the week and if you can get it done in less time then good for you and like you can watch Netflix if you want but like you shouldn't punish

1:40:44people for being good at their job if you're good enough but the thing is we also have hired people with such a ownership mentality they've they finished stuff early and they're like what else can I do who can I unblock and like it's like setting that culture and being very intentional early on that's made it a no-brainer to hire a remote team so I'm assuming you do that on Zoom that's how you manage or where Google meets team actually we don't we don't pay for them you got an affiliate link okay uh all right my ex employer actually yeah okay fair enough that actually makes sense Okay so

1:41:17what else do you use like what's your Tech stack what like management project management tools are using are using slack yeah every single tool you used yeah yeah so slacks HQ right so that's like the main thing I think you have to be really careful about slack too as a remote team because I think again going back to people conflating busy with getting [ __ ] done like it's really easy to slack people all day I'm like a huge like deep work like Focus nerd because I get very little of that and so I try to instill that on the team of it's actually annoying as [ __ ] when you slack

1:41:49your co-workers 15 times for every little thing that like you need to turn it off for like three hours I don't yeah I don't have like the numbers in front of me but the whole context switching and how much time it takes away from getting stuff done every time you get distracted like adds up a ton throughout the day and throughout the week so I carry out all that with like yes we use slack yes it's our Central Tool for communicating yes it gets annoying um and I try to like from a culture standpoint be very intentional when people should be slacking and when it can wait to a meeting which leads us to

1:42:20our next tool we use Google meets we're like a very meeting light team and that's also very intentional um one I hate meeting I like I'm not someone who feels productive in meetings I'm someone who feels productive with a to-do list of hears the 10 things I need to do this week outcome and checking them off and getting them done um like people management I know like a CEO like yes I manage people but like I'd rather give them the autonomy to make their own decisions and deliver results that's what we call it ownership mentalities for sure yeah yeah explain the difference of that between other

1:42:52companies that you'd say I I think there's a difference one like in startups especially smaller startups when you have equity in the company and like the upside is financially large for you for it to be successful there's also like a small team culture and component of like us against the world there are so many larger competitors and it's like fun like there's like I would say most people in the team sign up like sign in in the morning and like genuinely have fun at what they're doing and that's because we have so many touch points with our users people like when milpro gets acquired like there are so many

1:43:22features that the engineers built that that milk Road plugged into that contributed to their success and seeing that you spent two months building like the referral program feature or like the custom website or the custom newsletter formatting they took advantage of it then they sold their business for many millions of dollars and now everyone's praising one milk road to beehive as a platform and then knowing that you had a part either unblocking them on like the customer service side or building the actual tools that help them succeed like it's a really cool tangible feedback loop and so the more feedback loops and touch points you can get to your like

1:43:58early employees the more they feel a part of the journey and so when they're done working on like four or five pm and they're like but I could launch this additional feature yeah because I saw on Twitter this one user just bitching about this all day long and it'd be really cool and I have the power to fix their problem solve it and then DM them or tweet like hey we just fix that for you and they they get that touch point and so many of our Engineers take the ownership to go out of their way and be like hey I was like on Saturday I was on

1:44:24Twitter saw this person said I could be really cool if you did this so Saturday night I spent an hour I built that feature I tweeted at them that that's now available and now you have like a lifelong fan in that Twitter person yeah and that person on Twitter and like people see that they retweet it and they're like that's like real customer Obsession and like that's the the autonomy and ownership I give all of our employees to take advantage of uh I feel like it's just the difference of Milestones or like accomplishing an outcome or doing a task compared to you have to be here from eight to five or

1:44:52eight to five like and you have to figure out stuff to do even if you don't think there's anything to do I'd say there's like an extra step too there's like the I just show up because I get paid one salary to be there from nine through the bare minimum that's the bare minimum and that's where people get worried like how do you know they're not just like playing video games or like on Netflix all day and like if that's the kind of job and work environment you have like that's what you're gonna get there's like the next set which I alluded to which is more Milestone based

1:45:17like here's the expectations and I'd say we even go One Step Beyond that of like we're building something bigger here and you have equity and are financially invested in one like a career trajectory and opportunity to build something really cool like ideally people look back at or you look back in 10 15 years of your at your time at beehive and you're like we had something special we were surrounded by 10 15 20 of the smartest people I've ever met we were in a very competitive industry where everyone had more money than us everyone doubted us we had so many investors say no but like every day I woke up and I

1:45:49got to build something awesome users got to use my tech I got to see how they used it the success they had because of it and like really building something that means something is like the evolution more than like hey the expectation is you're getting [ __ ] done the expectation is you're getting things done but you're also building and genuinely excited and interested to provide the value that you're providing because you're a part of this trajectory in team and this story and so that's like where we are and it was like very hard but it's also because I think it starts with like me being upset best

1:46:17with one success and our customers and our users and trying to provide value the early co-founders having that same passion and like every one person we hired saw that and like you don't want to be the person who joins the team and it's like yeah I'm just gonna clock out when I can but it also even that like it's kind of if what if they want to play video games and they're just they've been doing this one skill for 10 years and they're very fast at what they do and you have all these different things that you need them to do and they can do them in like one or two days and

1:46:45then there's not really anything else they can do until everybody else in the team's done so it's almost like an incentive for them to be good at their job get it done really quickly like the idea that you want to hire lazy people because they're going to find the way to do something as quickly as possible I think I'm not saying like you have to devote your entire life in every waking moment like I do it's do what you need to do and I think if we like I find it really interesting and really cool when an engineer who typically like if you're part of a large corporation you build a

1:47:12feature you make some dashboard a little bit quicker so Finance can use this tool and like you hear from like Janice and fine answer she's really happy you built that tool like that's awesome but like when you spend three weeks building a feature that we know is going to provide a ton of value to newsletters it's like our hunches like this is going to be really valuable and well received you've been heads down building this for three weeks meticulously we launch it we see hundreds of signups and like upgrades on the day that we launched that feature because everyone's super interested so like the hunch was correct then people

1:47:41start using the tool that you just built and like along the way as the engineer you made so many small assumptions if I what if I moved this over here what I think this would be really cool and now you're seeing all those decisions pay off in real time and you see the product adoption from like the dashboards and event tracking and then you also get to see people on Twitter being like but yeah I just launched this amazing feature like it's so [ __ ] cool and like now I just I launched it today now my website looks better now I'm converting 10 higher so now I'm making

1:48:09more money like as the engineer who just spent three weeks of your life building that like how rewarding is that it's a great incentive and you have skin in the game and so finding ways to have every employee like the engineering example is easier to do but even customer success someone like has a bad experience you're able to turn that around provides such excellent support give them an extra like 30 days for free and they become a lifelong Advocate and then now that person who came in super angry in Customer Support is like being like yo I love beehive the best experience I've ever had shout out to the person on

1:48:39their support team like there's so many touch points that you can create with our users where you feel very bought into what we're doing in the journey and like that's my main job is really just getting people who are passionate and want to be a part of that journey and who can excel in that environment where I'm not going to give you like super strict outline Milestones or tell you what they do every day you know what the end goal is like we need to grow faster we need to make this better we need to do XYZ you kind of fill in the gaps and it's up to you to kind of execute and

1:49:09there's like a lot of autonomy I think a lot of it stems for like my experiences like I over index on hiring people that are Scrappy and like don't don't have like they didn't go to an Ivy League school I mean they can but did it go to an Ivy League school maybe they're self-taught like someone who self-taught themselves a skill and like stayed up very late on YouTube for months teaching themselves whether it's digital marketing or coding that's someone that I'd rather bet on it's personality than someone like you can't teach grit and drive and I'd rather bet on someone who has less of the accolades and like

1:49:41polished resume but have so much more drive and intangibles like because that was me that's interesting because think about the people like the intrinsic motivation to go to do the work to get into Harvard like you're you are doing the work to get an external validation to get that title because that's a status symbol and that would same thing would translate to okay you go to Harvard then you get a job at Facebook as a senior engineer or whatever it is and so it's like a different type of motivation you're doing it for the title or possibly for the like status maybe yeah so yeah I feel

1:50:13like for like brand names like like also I'm nothing against Harvard understand for like I'll hire from those schools too like I don't care but it's a different psychology because then the person that's learning you're going for the stamp of approval versus building some YouTube like YouTube doesn't give you a badge for studying those things it's like a very utilitarian like I want to get better at this and no one's going to recognize that I am better than that but my performance and my understanding of it when I applied to a job or build my own side hustle or business like it will be on full display because I

1:50:42learned that skill and like it's not on my resume there's no like flashy badge like I don't get any sort of Accolade I just want to get better at something and like also like the school track from high school to college is one thing and like you're just kind of on that track to spend nights and weekends going out of your way because you're genuinely interested or motivated I think shows like a different level of drive so I'm not taking away from my college education but I I I've realized in retrospect playing like armchair therapist like some of the things that I do or value is really from like my

1:51:14experience like I will bet on the person who just graduated but is so hungry and it's very apparent over someone who has been in this role for 10 years at like XYZ reputable company thinks they know what they're doing because like they don't have maybe they do have a drive and they come over generalizing now but I love the grittiest like people who want to show that they're willing to put in the work and they have a chip on their shoulder and a lot to prove because that is still me to this day 100 but definitely be like six years ago and then also like going back to what I said

1:51:42about my days at morning Brew like Austin and Alex didn't tell me every day what to do I knew what the end goal was and they were like figure it out and hopefully you deliver yeah and so that that's like I thrive so much in that environment and so I've kind of emulated that unintentionally of like our head of growth I've never told him what to do he just knows we need to grow faster and quicker and so he knows what that means and it's up to him but I'm not like saying here's like the 20 things we need to get done this week and that type of

1:52:09management style one I think is easier in a sense where I'm not as Hands-On and micromanaging but it's also more rewarding to the people that are reporting to you so you incentivize them and you find people that default to action if they don't have something to do they default do something I think that's one of our values that we did way back now there's like some bias towards action yeah yeah that's good I saw that some video somewhere yeah same with Elon musky like doesn't look at this is probably some cliche video of him but it's like he doesn't look at your school you en2 he asks what exceptional results

1:52:37have you had and that's kind of how he judges who to bring on his teams never like some title or Accolade that's really insightful okay but back to what we were actually talking yeah slack so I was gonna say Google me Google me like for video hangout but don't use it a lot so Google meets don't use a lot you have slack limited try to limit it Google yeah very meeting white partially because we were primarily I think our first five out of seven hires were engineers so it's like Engineers like just heads down build stuff and get so like we talking every day he's not

1:53:08gonna solve anything um so other Tech stack we use linear for project management like it's an engineering base so it's like set up for GitHub beautiful UI I'm a huge linear standing so I'll promote that all day um so that's like engineering based tickets like typical kanban or kanban whatever the hell you say like the board of moving things from like backlog to do progress and testing QA production so we use linear for that for non-engineering related initiatives use Asana for project management okay so for growth initiatives for content for SEO anything else that's not engineering we used to sign up for project management um what else do we use we use end desk

1:53:46for support our actual Tech stack is Ruby on rail so like that is what I love what Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails is like a coding language wow that's so crazy yeah it was the like very like it's what Twitter used to be built and I doubt it is like way back when it was built on Twitter Airbnb Shopify are like the big tech companies that were built on Ruby on Rails now I think they're either on that or use micro services but that's what I was taught or like taught myself and is that a coding language it's like a coding language framework the language

1:54:16is Ruby so like python I'm not technical yeah yeah I'm a YouTuber you told me you wanted to go deep on text oh I like it though so the coding languages are like python JavaScript Ruby JavaScript Ruby is Ruby's language I've heard a job I've heard of python yeah Ruby on Rails is the framework that creates so okay so we use Ruby on Rails website which at the time like I said Airbnb Shopify Twitter it was like the hot framework I think that those times have passed because as we've gone to hire more people are like oh we don't really use Ruby Much Anymore um so if you use Ruby on Rails apply to

1:54:51our jobs uh so that's like our like primary Tech stack um GitHub for code repositories I don't think what else we use for zendesk for customer support is that just like email management so everyone can see the emails is it like Instagram DMS which is kind of like a platform that'll manage you can so you can submit a support ticket to the platform hey my website appears to be like oh edit on your eyes website though we have like an API where you can send information and then we have like a poor team that has like okay you have 100 unanswered tickets of people complaining about XYZ

1:55:23we help unblock and solve their problems so simple people on the team can see those same requests in one place yeah exactly okay where do you when people like when customers want to give you feedback early on how did they do that was just like a support email in the bottom of the website a lot of it's like Twitter and it's like one of the key advantages I've had and also one of my downfalls is like I've made myself way too available so I answer you replied to our team's email when we signed up yeah five months ago yeah like multiple times immediately you oh yeah I respond to

1:55:53every Twitter DM LinkedIn DM like I'm very available one again it a lot of it comes with the anxiety guiding insecurities of an early startup founder being like what Alpha can I get from users the second someone's like hey this isn't working I want to make sure I see that I think we've moved past the like code red something isn't working in most cases so it's if something's not working well or can be better rather than them going to Twitter complaining about it or you know churning to another platform I want them to come to me and say hey I'm thinking about XYZ features would really

1:56:28be a Difference Maker for my newsletter I want that Insight all day long so it's honestly just like free customer Discovery it's like the very optimistic way of looking at making your DMs available the pessimistic way of looking at it is it's another customer support channel so when I open Twitter I'm not like oh I'm so excited to check Twitter it's how many DMS do I have that could be support issues could be someone complaining about something um so like I get stressed out and I have made myself too available but I mean there's two ways to look at that right like it also has kept a lot of customers

1:56:58around where early days when we didn't have the most robust feature set and people like hey I'm getting a little impatient with this not you know super great the fact that I can DM them directly and be like hey I hear you we're working on it we have two Engineers on it now it'll be live in three weeks and they have a relationship directly with the CEO it like has bought a lot of our users a little bit more time and patience to work with us are you ever saying that in your emails like hey if you guys have any suggestions or problems email us or message us here and

1:57:27those emails when people sign up like is that like yeah we used to ask for feedback pretty frequently it's like a balance because like feedback's great we also are like pretty strapped on band we have like we have eight Engineers they're hustling our road map is very very built out we keep like 10 to 20 room for like the feedback that we weren't anticipating that we think is actually a great idea and should prioritize I think that's a mistake a lot of companies make of like here's like the 10 things we're building in Q3 and we are not building anything else but these 10 things like focus is great

1:57:59but what if like something comes up that's actually a complete Difference Maker or a competitor launches something that's stealing a lot of your market share getting a lot more traction than you expected or a user just has an incredible idea that you're like actually when I look at my 10 things that I felt we were going to build this is actually more important and more valuable than four of them so why don't we bump that up so I think you have to strike a very delicate balance of hyper Focus like this is what we're trying to build we can't just take every point of feedback and iterate and change the

1:58:29roadmap based on whatever someone DMS us but you need to have some level of being receptive to feedback and willing to shift things around to accommodate users as the landscape changes okay really good advice the other tools um it's kind of the main ones a little random one you guys are pretty much you guys built what a lot of tools a lot of people would use tools you guys built stuff that people use tools for yeah I'm sure we use something I don't know what the platform is for social media to get all the posts out um I know what you're talking about I always forget that one

1:59:09they stopped working and then we used another one and then um no I'm sure I'm forgetting some tool that's like super valuable to us but like clearly not valuable enough for me to remember right now so okay we got the main ones all right well we're I think we're probably past two hours and I we could talk all day but last question I'll probably ask you or leave you with is what what problem or what idea that you didn't think now what idea that you didn't think would be that impactful or that could have a feature for your tool that you implemented was actually way more successful than you thought it

1:59:47would be I'd say it's something we're investing we're I mean I don't know when this launches so this will be live by the time that this launches but tomorrow we're launching the ability to customize your home page and we play like a very weird space and we're primarily a newsletter platform but we provide a website for you out of the box if you want to host your own fully custom website on WordPress or webflow like you can integrate with our Tech use us for email newsletters use your own website but out of the box we do have website features and so there's always a delicate balance

2:00:19of like we'll never be as expansive as a WordPress who's been doing it for like 15 20 years or like a web flow which is a multi-billion dollar company solely on building websites what can we get closer where we can solve most of your use cases so we're kind of balancing that how far do you want to take that yeah so how far do we go like this is the end of the line and anything beyond this like here's our apis here's how you'd integrate you go use one of those platforms versus like the endless like oh you could customize this or here's like five new layouts that you can use

2:00:49um but the website is actually like the it's the home page and like the first touch point of people's online presence and their content and so people are very opinionated on how their website look talks how it converts what customers what customizations you can have around the website and so it's always kind of been like it's cool that we offer a website but like you know the newsletter the growth the monetization is and where I'd say like 80 of our focus is a month and a half ago we launched customizing your landing page so you can have background images you can add testimonials you can add different

2:01:22layouts you can add different styles and images a little details it was the number one feature we've ever launched in terms of like how many people used it and in in terms of people upgrading so we put it on like a paid plan and so we had so many people that were hanging out on the free plan but the fact that you could customize your landing page to have an awesome background color and image and testimonials make sense move the needle more than any of our other features and it caused the most upgrades that we've ever had and it's really weak and so tomorrow we're doing an extension

2:01:52of that where you can now so there's like the landing page where you collect emails but then there's like the home page which is like newyorktimes.com essentially where like the premium stories are all the most recent posts the authors other widgets and tomorrow we're launching the ability to customize the hell out of that page cool more layouts more themes more widgets more features and customization options my guess is going to do really well but that's like an Insight that I knew that people cared about their website but I didn't know that it would get people who have been very stubbornly on the free plan forever to be like that's what's

2:02:25going to get me to upgrade is I want people custom designed to land on my website and be like wow that looks amazing maybe I only have 500 subscribers like it's a small operation right at least one of those 500 subscribers to feel something special when they land on my website um so that's like an Insight that I mean it makes perfect sense but I just don't think we ever over index I wouldn't think that that's the and moves the needle and it I mean I don't know how much it like moves the needle but as far as like getting people to upgrade it it did more than most other feature

2:02:53launches that we have that's real a great answer that's really insightful for me top of mind for me because we're launching it but after this I have to write out the whole email about it so have fun you're good at those I love your emails okay okay I guess one last last thing why should someone start a newsletter why should they use beehive to do it so if you've been listening up until this point the why you should start a newsletter I think you made like the strongest bookcase but you can get started it's free to get started unless you want to use our premium newsletter our website

2:03:20builder and you can pay but it's very cost effective you own your audience you have a direct line to your most loyal fans it can be top of funnel for premium content communities Affiliates advertisements there's a lot of monetization opportunities and it's portable so you can take it to whatever platform you want whenever you want to unlike the other big social platforms so as far as expanding influence and making money I think newsletters are an incredible channel so that's the answer to why newsletters and then why beehive if you've made it through two and a half hours I'm talking to this point I would hope what you would take from that is we

2:03:58know what we're doing we are obsessed with our customers we know what it takes to make a very successful newsletter and we're also aware and we know what we don't know in terms of like we're willing to listen to other people who are having success or have a hunch of what would make their newsletter more successful and we're willing to build the tools and I think some of our other competitors have taken philosophy over being pragmatic and they have a very hard stance on what they think is the right way to do things and like I said to you earlier I don't give a [ __ ] if

2:04:28you use our ad Network or use your own ad network if you're making money and having success I'm happy that you're using us and having success and if having your own ad opportunities is better for you we will build tools for you to facilitate managing your ad inventory better even if it's not our ads because your successes are success and I think if we really nailed that and continue to lean into what users want like that is the recipe to win in business in general and that's like our philosophy Tyler dank appreciate you brother appreciate it man guys check out beehive b-e-e-b-e-e-h-i-iib.com that's Tyler dink on Twitter d n k

2:05:07awesome have a wonderful day guys watch this one over you'll learn a lot