How Beehiiv Hit $10.2M Revenue Using Strategic SaaS and Ad Network Tactics

Start a newsletter today and you have, in Tyler Denk’s words, maybe “10 subscribers, which is your mom and your siblings.” Netflix is not calling. “Netflix was never looking at you previously to advertise,” the beehiiv founder and CEO told Nathan Latka in June 2024. “They didn’t know that you existed.”

Beehiiv’s whole pitch lives in that gap.

“Most SaaS platforms in the ecosystem are purely a cost,” Denk said. “You pay them to send emails. They don’t help you grow. They don’t help you monetize. We help you grow with our growth suite. We help you monetize.”

By the June 2024 conversation, beehiiv had just crossed $10.2 million in ARR on the SaaS side alone, not yet three years after launch. GetLatka’s records now run the line out to $30 million. The interesting part is the order in which Denk built it.

Early employee money is not founder money

Denk was the second employee at Morning Brew, where he built growth and product until the company’s $75 million exit. That kind of outcome sounds like it funds a founder’s next act. It doesn’t. “Enough to have a nice car and apartment and a decent life,” he said, “but not enough to fund a whole second purchase and be able to pay a CTO and everything else. There’s a big difference between early employee money and founder money.”

That difference is why beehiiv raised at all. Denk and his co-founders Ben and Jake started roadmapping and writing code in November 2020; the vendors wouldn’t wait for revenue. Sending email at scale meant an annual SendGrid contract with a volume lock-in — “between 40 and $75,000 upfront for the year, of which my two co-founders were 24, I was 27. We’re not sitting on a ton of money.” So: a $2.6 million seed in the fall of 2021, selling about 10% of the company when the going rate was closer to 20. They went full time in September 2021 and launched publicly that November.

Two startups, in the right order

Everyone describes beehiiv as a marketplace between publishers and advertisers. Denk corrects the sequence every time. “We are building a SaaS platform first that can stand alone as the best SaaS platform for sending emails in the industry,” he said, naming Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Substack as the competition. “That comes before marketplace, before network, before monetization.”

First the platform had to attract newsletters; the newsletters brought the impressions; the impressions brought the advertisers. A year before the interview, the network simply “did not exist.” Beehiiv even bought speed where it could, acquiring the newsletter ad marketplace Swapstack in 2023.

We are tackling two totally distinct problem sets on top of each other, and one doesn’t work without the other. Startups are kind of hard as is — doing two startups at once in some capacity has been difficult. But the payoff and the network effects, if we can nail it, are much greater.

Tyler Denk, founder & CEO, beehiiv

The numbers he gave without notes

Midway through the interview Denk pointed out, amused, that he hadn’t been briefed on any of the questions — “this is kind of right off the cuff.” The numbers came anyway:

• SaaS subscriptions — plans starting at $39 a month: “8 to 900,000 a month currently.”
• The ad network — several hundred thousand dollars more per month.
• The month of the recording — he expected $1.2 to $1.4 million in total revenue, against roughly $250,000 to $300,000 in the same month a year earlier.
• All of 2023 — somewhere “between 6 and 8 million in revenue”.

The platform behind that: about 20,000 active publishers (sent at least one email in the prior 30 days) pushing 1.3 billion emails a month to what he estimated at 150 to 200 million unique subscribers. Between 20 and 25% of active publishers had earned money through the platform in the previous month. His off-the-cuff guess at the metric he called the real north star — “very unique in the SaaS ecosystem where it’s usually just an expense for your business”:

15%of active publishers earn more than they pay beehiiv

The funding history he rattled off the same way:

• Fall 2021 · Seed $2.6 million.
• May 2022 · Seed extension $1.6 million — “supposed to be it — but I’ve been wrong three times.”
• Summer 2023 · Series A $12.5 million.
• Mar 2024 · Series B $33 million, led by NEA at a publicly disclosed $225 million valuation.

On dilution, he shrugged at the raw percentage: what matters is “who controls the board, who has the rights to make the core decisions — of which we are in control of the business.”

What the record shows

Here is beehiiv’s revenue line in GetLatka’s records — every point a recorded figure, starting from the month it launched:

As of 2026, GetLatka lists total funding at $49.7 million across the four rounds, with the March 2024 Series B and its $225 million valuation still the latest on record, and a team last recorded at 142 in August 2024 — current figures are on the beehiiv profile.

At the end of the interview, Latka congratulated him on passing $10 million — hopefully “a big cheers in the office.” Denk’s team is fully distributed. “We’re totally remote,” he said, “so virtual cheers.” Then he named the next target: “We’re gunning for $1 million MRR. That’s our goal, as soon as possible.” The table above says how that went.

SourcesTyler Denk’s June 2024 interview with Nathan Latka; GetLatka’s recorded revenue and funding figures through June 2026.