Tyler Denk has a migraine. His doctor says he's working too late, staring at screens too much of his day. Denk gets it. He's still figuring out an optimal work-life balance. But when that screen shows beehiiv, his email newsletter platform, shooting past $1.5 million in monthly revenue, he doesn't feel like taking a break. He'd rather keep building.
Denk has been a fixture of the email newsletter world since 2017, when his former middle-school basketball teammate Austin Rief hired him to lead engineering and growth efforts at the business-focused newsletter Morning Brew. Denk moved from his home state of Maryland to New York City for the job, just when the newsletter format was starting to gain popularity through outlets like the Skimm and Axios. Denk learned that newsletters are, he says, "a very compelling medium and business model to build a company around."
beehiiv, the platform he founded in 2021, is designed to help creators build and profit from their online followings. Users pay a monthly fee to gain access to a robust suite of tools, enabling them to design websites and newsletters, grow a community of readers and subscribers, and make money through ads and premium tiers, and even by boosting the popularity of other newsletters. Unlike, say, Substack, beehiiv is explicitly designed to convert readers into revenue, a process Denk helped revolutionize earlier in his career.
Rief had launched Morning Brew as a newsletter because the medium is cheap and easy to set up, but he and Denk realized that newsletters have a unique power: They free writers from relying on algorithms or needing to pivot toward whatever format social media is prioritizing. There's just a direct relationship between creator and subscriber.
Newsletters also scale phenomenally well. For most traditional publishers, scaling requires hiring more employees, but according to Denk, that's not true of newsletters. "Whether you're writing to 10 people or 10 million people, it's the same amount of work," he says. But the amount of ad revenue you can make from a newsletter that reaches hundreds of thousands or millions is huge. "When I saw that we could press send," adds Denk, "and that would print $50,000 to $60,000 per day from advertisers, because we were sending to 1.5 million people, all while there were just five of us working at the company, it kind of opened my eyes."
As Morning Brew soared past one million subscribers, Denk started fielding messages from creators wanting to pick his brain about his strategy for growing the newsletter. He saw an opportunity to compete against Substack, which had raised $17 million from investors and was gaining in popularity with its paywall-based subscription model.
Substack rose to prominence in the early 2020s by luring notable journalists and writers away from legacy institutions with a promise to help them monetize their relationship with readers directly. But Denk noticed what he considered blind spots in Substack's business model: The platform wasn't nearly as useful for creators lacking a pre-established audience, and there was no way for users to make money other than via paid subscriptions. Plus, Substack takes a 10 percent cut of all paid-subscription fees. That's not a big problem for smaller publications, but for creators with large followings pulling in millions of dollars in paid-subscription revenue, 10 percent off the top every month can add up. (Substack did not respond to Inc.'s requests for comment.)
In 2019, Denk pitched Rief on making Morning Brew's internal newsletter tools commercially available to customers looking to start their own newsletters—and was shot down. "I thought it was a terrible idea," recalls Rief. At the time, he didn't see the need for more newsletter-building infrastructure. Not internally incubating what eventually became beehiiv was "the biggest financial mistake I've made," Rief says.
In October 2020, Denk left Morning Brew for a cushy job at Google, and just a couple of weeks later, learned that Rief and co-founder Alex Lieberman had sold their company to Business Insider for $75 million. Suddenly, his belief in the value of newsletters was affirmed. He couldn't stop thinking about his pitch to Rief.
With little else to do during his one-week break between leaving Morning Brew and joining Google, Denk and his former Brew co-workers Ben Hargett and Jake Hurd expanded Denk's idea for a newsletter platform into beehiiv. After months of working nights and weekends, the trio developed a business model that would allow creators to make money through both advertising and paid subscriptions.
Unlike Substack, their platform wouldn't take a revenue percentage from its creators' subscription fees; instead, it would charge creators a flat monthly fee to use the platform. Plus, beehiiv would be designed to help anyone develop a newsletter community, not just those with hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
In the summer of 2021, Denk went to Los Angeles and managed to raise $2.6 million in pre-seed funding. "As soon as that money hit the bank," he says, "I quit Google." And his co-founders quit Morning Brew.
He also moved from New York to L.A. "I knew I would be working 16-hour days and over weekends, so when I do get the chance to be free and go outside, I want it to be sunny and warm and nice," says Denk. When Denk isn't at his computer, he can be found partaking in hot yoga or surfing at the beach, a new hobby he's taken up only in the past few years, but has found "incredibly meditative."
He decided that instead of following the traditional founder playbook of keeping his cards close to the chest, he'd build beehiiv in public. His theory: People want to follow founders as they grow their business, both for entertainment and advice as they look to start their own.
Denk did something else: He assumed a heightened and brash persona when posting on social media, confidently sharing financial milestones, highlighting product updates, and boosting customer success stories. "If I just tweeted about email newsletters," says Denk, "there's only a small market of people who really give a shit about that. But if I tweet about building a business, raising capital, and hiring, I expand the market of people interested in learning more."
Denk attracted thousands of new followers and scored invites to appear on podcasts, where he could spread the word about beehiiv. "It was amazing for recruiting and finding investors," he says, "because I didn't have to bullshit them."
In 2023, beehiiv raised $12.5 million in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Lightspeed investor Nicole Quinn says she first heard of beehiiv from her husband, who had transitioned his own newsletter business from Mailchimp to it. Beyond beehiiv's potential to become a billion-dollar company—Denk says it is currently bringing in $1.6 million to $1.75 million per month—Quinn was impressed by Denk's ability to get new product features out quickly. "We had never seen a founder shipping at the speed that Tyler was. Sometimes, he'll just text us emoji of ships," she says, "because he's always shipping."
Rief also belatedly decided to invest in the business. He had seen the creator economy boom during the pandemic, but also noticed social media algorithms becoming less reliable as a method for building engagement, and other newsletter competitors weren't positioning themselves to take advantage of the market. "Their competitors were focused on everything besides the customer," says Rief, whereas "beehiiv's maniacal focus on the customer was just inspiring."
Another benefit to Denk's build-in-public strategy? He's one of beehiiv's most active users, constantly giving feedback to his engineering team based on his experience creating his own newsletter, Big Desk Energy, which has grown to more than 60,000 subscribers since he began publishing in January.
Denk found this method of using his own product so useful that he created an onboarding process that tasks new hires with creating their own companywide newsletter to introduce themselves. He says around 15 of beehiiv's 75 workers have a newsletter side project, and some are generating meaningful revenue.
But Denk isn't just braggy about his successes. He's also been candid about beehiiv's struggles, particularly regarding the sudden death of the company's original chief technical officer, Andrew Platkin, who passed away in April 2022, six months after beehiiv's launch. On Twitter, Denk shared the news and eulogized his friend, but assured his followers that "we're going to continue to build and finish what Andrew had helped start."
Recovering from the loss took time; he still keeps a photo of Platkin on his desk. He reflects that "it makes me smile thinking how happy he'd be to see what this has all become."
Not that it was easy. He admits to rushing a replacement CTO hire who wasn't a good fit. But by August 2022, the beehiiv team had regained momentum, and Denk made good on his promise to continue building.
In April 2024, the company raised $33 million in a Series B round, and in Q3, newsletters on beehiiv collectively earned over $3.5 million through the platform's revenue-generating methods, which now include the ability to set multiple paid subscription tiers.
Denk has also leveraged his online persona to go on the offensive against rival companies. In October, beehiiv released a video mocking fellow audience-building platform Kit for spending months talking up its rebrand (from ConvertKit) instead of shipping new features. "It was so cringey," says Denk, "I kind of wanted to rain on their parade." beehiiv created a promotion, cheekily called its "Convert to beehiiv Kit," specifically designed to lure customers away from the competitor with a six-month free trial and guaranteed premium sponsors. To launch on the same day as Kit's official rebranding, the entire campaign came together in less than a week. After five days, Denk says, the promotion had already added $175,000 to beehiiv's sales pipeline and garnered more than one million impressions on social media. Love it or hate it, people were talking about beehiiv. (When asked about beehiiv's competitive moves, Kit CEO Nathan Barry told Inc. that his company is completely focused "on helping creators build valuable businesses.")
Recently, Denk has been taking the fight to Substack. In a December 10 newsletter post titled "Death by a Thousand Substacks," Denk argued that Substack is more interested in building out its own brand and ecosystem than helping its less-popular newsletters find an audience. He wrote that Substack is deploying "the classic social network playbook" that platforms like Facebook and Twitter have used to hurt publishers in the past: "Gradually eroding the ownership, identity, and independence of writers on the platform." With beehiiv, Denk wants to restore that sense of ownership.
At Morning Brew, Denk saw firsthand how pairing unique value with a memorable voice for storytelling can make newsletters and business alike soar, and now he's trying to re-create that experience at scale with beehiiv. One of beehiiv's most notable success stories is Milk Road, a cryptocurrency-focused newsletter from Ben Levy and Shaan Puri, the co-host of the My First Million podcast. The pair had ambitions to scale and sell their own newsletter.
About 10 months into Milk Road's growth, the newsletter boasted around 180,000 subscribers, but Levy wanted more. Specifically, he was looking to advertise on websites with high SEO rankings for crypto news, so Denk put him in touch with crypto media company Bitfi. What started as a conversation around advertising morphed into talk around how the two brands could collaborate further, eventually ending with Bitfi acquiring Milk Road for what Levy says was a "multimillion-dollar exit."
Still, Denk says beehiiv isn't profitable on a monthly basis, and he won't feel comfortable declaring success until it has achieved its outsize goals. Those include reaching $2 million in monthly revenue by the end of 2024 and annual revenue of $40 million for 2025, at which point the company will reach a profit.
But he's confident that beehiiv has only scratched the surface of what it will become. As its user base has grown, Denk has noticed something peculiar: Creators are posting screenshots of their own dashboards to social media. Just as Denk has been building in public, constantly posting his monthly revenue, these creators are posting their own growth metrics, celebrating as their active subscriber count climbs higher and higher. That feeling of progress, the thrill of watching numbers go up, is what fuels Denk and the creators he serves. Migraine be damned.
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