How Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk grew Beehiiv to $30M revenue and 90K customers in 2025.

Guys Tyler dank launched beehive uh.com in 2020 late 2020 they start coding for 10 months they launched officially in 2021 they get going today finished last year about a year ago had about 4 million in terms of run rate today at 10.2 million they make their money off three interesting lines obviously ad premium boost but also their SAS fee that's the biggest one they've got 20,000 active senders meaning they sent at least one email in the past 30 days about 4,000 of those senders make money on average they make about 1.2 million cumulative last month or about $300 per sort of send obviously there's power laws there they have a total of 150 million unique Subs so certainly making great inroads not only on the SAS model but also the ad Network and all the growth tools he's building really uh democratizing what he built and uh and grew at morning Brew hey folks my guest today is Tyler Den he cut his teeth up in Maryland at the University of Maryland as a research lead before finding a Marketplace at Venture storm and ultimately jumping into the world he's now known for as the growth engineer in 2017 at morning Brew he accelerated there in terms of product and growth and eventually senior product lead before building the business or helping build the business to millions of subscribers 20 million bucks of Revenue and a $75 million uh exit before jumping then into Google and now launching his full-time Focus beehive uh about in called August of 2021 we're going to jump to the full story today Tyler you ready to take us to the top yeah that was a hell of a recap in 30 seconds great job I appreciate that out of curiosity you know morning Brew is on a tear you have this unique Gene of being like marketer but also you have an engineering Gene in you you write code why why not stay at morning Brew post acquisition yeah you said this was a short podcast so very loaded question to get started with but um yeah morning Brew was amazing I had an opportunity to jump in as the second employee and I think you nailed it I have an engineering background growth mindset understand marketing understand business and that combination of understanding how all the pieces fit together and being able to build and code and understand how to build a polished product um that's kind of been my sweet spot in my career so came into morning Brew amazing success story learned a lot the founders gave me a ton of room to run um but after three and a half years I'd say like that blank white page of like things to build it was like already established we we were we had the the newsletter we had the ecosystem we had the growth um and I've always had like a Founder mentality where I just wanted more and ownership to be able to dictate what to build um so I think it served its purpose I obviously wouldn't be doing what I was do what I'm doing today if it weren't for the morning Brew experience but was definitely ready to try something new well it's great obviously you build a product you eat your own dog food that by itself is a natural Advantage getting into any new startup you're now building beehive which is effectively a Marketplace between Publishers and advertisers anything you'd add to that sort of on line overview yeah I actually say that would be like the second line of what we're doing the first is we are a SAS platform for Publishers content creators um businesses to send email so anything from MailChimp constant cont substack like those are kind of the competitors if you are sending email to your audience or to your customers we are first and foremost a SAS platform to send emails what you hit on is actually the second part which is we are building an ad Network on top of the SAS platform so as someone who is sending newsletters to Their audience we have advertisers like Netflix HubSpot monday.com betterment that are looking to reach the niche audiences of newsletters and we help connect them so you can send a newsletter with the premium sponsor sponsor without having a sales team Tyler you said last month on your website about 1.2 million paid out to newsletters on behive last month which would have been what is that May April May May of 2024 here what what was that exactly a year ago that same number much smaller so the ad Network didn't really exist the ad network was always something that we wanted to build but you can't build an ad network with a few hundred thousand Impressions we had to build a SAS platform that was really good that attracted nsls to move over which brought more email sends Impressions and then demand from advertisers so the ad Network a year ago today did not exist we also have poost Network which is like code registration being able to you basically get paid for recommending other newsletters that also didn't exist a year ago um and then premium subscriptions has existed from the beginning and that's what when you can charge your audience directly $10 a month $100 a year whatever you want to do there um we actually launched with that feature um so that's probably what you would see on the website a year ago in terms terms of the volume of Revenue we are driving for our users and and I want to get sort of the headlines today I don't want to bury the lead and then go back and get the sort of origin story of you building the tool what is the number one metric you're sort of focused on to say revenue is easy but is it number of Publishers number of email sends Impressions something else yeah revenue is easy because it actually means you do so many other things right right like if retention is important to you but re re a decrease in Revenue will show that you aren't retaining users or if a decrease or slow of Revenue shows that you aren't attracting the right users to adopt the platform and converting them so Revenue really is the Northstar but layers below that is volume of email because we're building an ad Network so we need billions and billions of Impressions high quality Impressions um unique Publishers because we want different types of content being sent on the platform from business to politics to sports to HomeGoods whatever you want to write about um we want like a very diverse ecosystem of different content creators and Publishers creating content on the platform um but it yeah again it all ties down to revenue uh slowing Revenue means we aren't converting or returning and those are things that we're actively looking to prevent how many unique Publishers are on the platform today and how do you define unique yeah so unique Publishers is the amount we do active so active Publishers means that they have sent an email in the past 30 days um and so we have about 20,000 active Publishers on the platform today W and then some Publishers are part of like a collective of like what we call an org or like an account essentially someone might have multiple different newsletters under a single account so the account is a bit less than that um but active Publishers is about 20,000 okay and and does so active Publishers means they sent let's go down one more step down the funnel of the 20,000 how many of them made at least a dollar last month through the ad Network it's good question so we have a metric around not just the ad network but any of so we have three moneti ation methods that I outlined the ad network is One Premium subscription so charging directly your audience a subscription fee and then boost as the other I believe right now we're at 20 to 25% of active users have monetized in the past 30 days our Northstar is obviously going much higher than that but it is a very nent ad Marketplace as are the rest of our features we're only two years old so the fact that most SAS Platforms in the ecosystem are purely cost 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 with the three ways that I just outlined so the fact that 20 to 25% of our active users are earning Revenue through our platform I think is an incredibly positive signal also the our Northstar metric really is how many of our users are earning more Revenue than they are paying us right like you might be paying us $99 a month but you're earning $600 $700 a month through the the ad Network alone then we are value additive to your Tech stack uh which is very unique in the SAS ecosystem where it's usually just an expense for your business how many of those are there Tyler they make more than what their subscription fee is we're so we we just hired a data data analy like a few months ago so we're but that is what we're working towards if 25% are actively monetizing on a month-to-month basis um I don't know probably half of that are net positive because we are very affordable so probably I'd say 10 15% are net positive and how many of the 20,000 unique Publishers unique active Publishers uh how many subscribers they have in total um our active so we're sending what 1.3 billion emails a month right now and active readerships usually I think about 10 10% probably like 150 to 200 million subscri unique subscribers across the Eco system yeah um I I was not just to give the audience a heads up I was not briefly on any of these question nor do I have any of these metrics like readily available or prepar this is kind of right off the cuff no no we like right off the cuff otherwise we get scripted answers so so we appreciate you being transparent but 20,000 unique uh active Publishers uh and then you take that down to 25% monetizing that's 4,000 and then if you divide that into the 1.2 million you paid out last months I mean these are folks on average making hundreds right $320 per...