How Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk grew 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 month on average but I guess true or false Tyler I imagine you probably have power laws in your user base right you have some big newsletters that make the chunk of the revenue yeah there's definitely larger newsletters more established bigger brand name that brandons want to work with and that just by nature of size and reputation are getting more money whether it's through premium subscriptions because they have a bigname person behind them that can warrant charging 105 $20 a month for Content or Community um and then advertisers as well but I actually think yes we have power users the longtail is actually what's most interesting because previously a lot of people saw a morning brew and axio a hustle having a lot of success and was so cost prohibitive and like such a daunting task to have to scale an audience to be that large to be able to monetize yourself and what we've been able to solve with the long tail is like the cold start problem where with Boost you don't need a single subscriber you can start monetizing day one you can recommend five other newsletters that are paying you $2 per lead you might have 10 subscribers which is your mom and your siblings and every subscriber that comes in the door you can start monetizing $2 per recommendation so you're net positive day one and then the Network as well if you're a 500 person subscriber newsletter Netflix was never looking at you previously to advertise they didn't know that you existed but with our Marketplace we can actually Place highquality ads like Netflix HubSpot betterment into your newsletter um and you're monetizing and again cash flow positive month one so I actually think the longtail is what's most exciting obviously volume and the big name players is what moves most of the volume of dollars and reputation um but the long is definitely something we're excited as about switching away from the network for a second and just focusing on your growth tools right which is what I think most people want to think about email marketing they sort of think about the other tools that you use to send emails you obviously charge a SAS fee there do all 20,000 active senders also pay that SAS fee or is it a subset of those 20,000 so we have a free plan up to 25,200 subscribers which is fairly generous one of the most generous in the industry so you can get started and just not tap into all of our premium features but send emails have a website um use different growth tools and customization tools without paying as long as you're under 2500 subscribers um but then you can upgrade at any size to access ad Network boost referral program Advanced website customization so there's kind of like a multiple tiered approach to the business model it's both volum based and whether you want premium features or not and how many folks do you have on the sub subscription sort of SAS plan uh I don't have the number off the top of my head but we're at about 850 900 ,000 Mr um great so that's our Revenue currently so you can kind of back into plans range from starting at $39 a month all the way up to 299 3.99 before you hit Enterprise yeah well thanks for sharing that number and congrats on the big milestone past 10 million bucks of AR that hopefully that that that got a big cheers in the office yeah yeah well we're totally remote so virtual cheers yes yeah we're gunning for 1 million Mr that that's our go for as soon as possible really hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan Latka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview and just to be clear you're you're not taking there's not like a percent of AD spend that you're keeping right that 850 is all from subscription SAS so yeah there's it's hard to communic because I am pretty transparent with their numbers as you can tell and so like I communicate but it gets Lost in Translation because there's a few different revenue streams the SAS business is purely has nothing to do with ads that is people paying us a monthly or annual recurring subscription for the SAS platform and that's at 8 900,000 a month currently the ad Network itself is bringing in another several hundred, do in revenue and then monthly or annually monthly oh okay great um o overall Revenue as of like this recording is about 1.2 to 1 .4 million as well we end up this month so yeah it's it's it's interesting because like a lot of like I interview so many entrepreneurs and sequencing is so important what I mean by that is you you there were companies before you doing this Marketplace model I mean I tried some of them like paved right but they just they just didn't deliver right and they were only doing Marketplace they weren't doing this sort of full comprehensive scope that you're doing I guess how much would you credit your success and you seem like a humble guy so maybe you're not going to take credit but to your sequencing what you did first what you launched second once you launched third and how they all work together I would say that it's very intentional right like I'm fully aware of paved and the other Marketplace is one of paves competitors this uh swap stack and we actually acquired them last year so like two-sided marketplaces in in any medium have kind of existed for a very long time where we benefit and it's again granted it's much harder what we're doing we are building a SAS platform first that can stand alone as the best SAS platform for sending emails in the industry like that comes before Market place before Network before monetization that is just we can build a better platform with better Creator tools helps you build a website and helps you scale your audience with the right data that's enjoyable to use and so that is already a very difficult problem to do in a competitive space like email then later once we have enough Impressions but this was always the goal from day one you just don't build it initially was we we were always going to layer on and add Network on top which is a totally separate problem set and it is very difficult from like where I stand to be able to optimize an ad network but also make sure that the editor works perfectly well and the email automations go out perfect because like we are tackling two totally distinct problem sets on top of each other and one doesn't work without the other um so startups are kind of hard as is kind of doing two startups at once in some capacity has been difficult um but I think the payoff and the network effects if we can nail it are much greater uh couple minutes left here some some questions just on growth since you're so transparent with the numbers which we appreciated if you're at 10.2 million AR today and that's just pure SAS right if you take go back a year ago today what was Revenue then yeah great question I don't have what what is it June right now no idea probably 300 probably in the 250 to 300 range I'd say so call it 3.64 million a months a year something like that run R run ratewise yeah I think last year we did between six and eight million in revenue for the year that's great and then uh when did you write the first line of code for the platform I know you guys you just actually retweeted a video that says hey we coded for you know 10 months and then finally posted the launch message was that the was that the was that what it was 10 10 months pre- Revenue just building yeah so we raised our seed round in the July or August of 2021 um went full time right after that so call it September 2021 is like when we went full time November 2021 is when we launched publicly and accepting like new users who could sign up on their own so November 2021 was a launch if you back up 10 months me and my two co-founders Ben and Jake started kind of Road mapping and building code probably November December of 2020 so 10 11 months prior to going all in and what was the size of the seed round how much did you raise there we raised 2.6 so pay ourselves hire a CTO pay H hire a few additional engineers and then you know I'm I'm a big fan of like being able to bootstrap I think people who can do that incredible and like definitely hats off to them we had like big vendors we had to pay up front we had to lock in annual commitments we're all fairly young didn't like what what was the biggest expense early on like for example we are built on top of send grid which is like an email engine to actually send and distribute the emails and to get the attention that we needed from them we needed like an annual contract with some sort of like volume lock in which is like I don't know between 40 and $75,000 up front for the year of which like my two co-founders were 24 I was 27 like we're not sitting on a ton of money to just be able to pay that um so I I do think the timing of Entrepreneurship is always like fairly interesting where you know if we had a successful exit previously and had a bit more Capital could we have done this bootstrap growing a little bit slower and been able to use existing Capital rather than being Venture back it's interesting um but I think it also is worth considering just how competitive of an industry it is and something to be said about not having to overanalyze every expense while we're trying to win market share mhm I mean you were in play number two at morning Brew just not enough equity to see meaningful cash distribution when they were acquired for 75 million bucks enough to have a nice car and apartment and like a decent life but not enough to be able to fund a a whole second and like purchase and be able to pay like a CTO and everything else so there's a difference but early but I'd say the takea away from that was there's a big difference between early employee money and and founder money fair enough fair enough and the seed rounds you know 2021 most folks were selling caught 15 20% of the company were you sort of in that same range no we were closer to 10% oh 10 okay got it and then you've raised more sents then when was the last round yeah so we did I can give you our whole funding background 2.6 million in the fall summer of 2021 we did another one. sy just like a seed extension in I'd say may of 2022 kind of like a hey we have product Market fit we need a few more highers that was supposed to be it I always say that we're never going to raise again um but I've been roll three times we raised a 12 A5 million series a in the summer of 2023 and then we just raised a 33 million doll series B led by Nea in March of 2024 so most people say right now it's crazy time to raise that Equity were you able to get it to valuation you liked obviously in the series B yeah so the valuation is actually public so it's it was 225 so I care less about valuation more about ownership having enough Capital to build the business but yeah we say ownership drives is driven I mean that's what that's 15% dilution right so so you you can care about ownership but obviously when you're doing the capital rise you got to make sure you put yourself in a position to not lose control of the business right yeah I think when ownership probably over said in terms of like the different layers of ownership there's ownership of like raw percentage of the business that you have outstanding and then also like who controls the board who has like the rights to be able to make the poe decisions um of which we are in control of the business still that's great that's great uh anything before we wrap up anything you want the the audience to know that we haven't chatted about already no I'm super impressed with how quickly you're able to run through everything in 15 that was great we got to get back to the gym you know how it is man so let's wrap up here with the famous five number one your favorite Business book favorite Business book honestly it may not be a business book but thinking fast and slow is more of like a psychology book and I think applicable to business and everything else yeah number two is there a CEO you're following or studying no but I really admire Brian chesky number three besides srid Which online tool do you pay the most money for probably something boring like AWS Heroku uh just like infrastructure click house something like that number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night Tyler I prioritize sleep between seven and eight that's great yeah great you you said earlier I hope you're mind don't mind me sharing this we on a rest day which is the third Friday of the month which is awesome nice balance yeah we do uh I picked that up from when I was at Google during Co they did like one every like few months but we have a monthly Wellness day the third Friday of every month is a day off so 3day weekend um so yeah that is today eight hours of sleep and how old are you today 30 30 years old and situation married single kiddos single no kiddos well have a girlfriend but I guess like as a tax filing that's single yeah fair enough I love that that's your default it's like according to the government my tax file I just talk to accountants and everything else so like not used to saying like I'm in the mind saying single but yes yeah fair enough fair enough last question something you wish you knew back when you were 20 um great question um I actually wouldn't even say something that I would change or or something that I learned but I would actually double down on moving to a big city and getting to meet people now I live in Los Angeles I stay in my room and work all day but being in New York in my early 20s being able to meet people at work networking happy hours everything else I've met such an incredible group of people that has helped Propel my career forward so vermote is amazing I'm the biggest Advocate at remote work but I think if you can get to a city and even make the time to network yourself um You probably wouldn't regret that Guys Tyler dank launch bive 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 at had 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 sender 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 democratizing what he built and uh and grew at morning Brew so Tyler appreciate you man thanks for taking us to the top yo thanks for having me