Why Everyone Has a Newsletter Now

0:00Jasmine Enberg: Hi, everyone. This is Scalable, a weekly show about the business of the creator economy. I'm Kaya Yurieff. And I'm Jasmine Enberg. Every Thursday, we take you beyond the headlines to tell you what's happening, what it means, and why it matters. We have a newsletter that has 10 ,000 readers about magicians. It's for magicians. 10 ,000 readers, they make 70 grand a year through subscriptions. Email is having somewhat of a renaissance. Newsletters have quietly become one of the most reliable businesses on the internet. But today's top newsletters aren't just, well, newsletters, and writers are competing in an increasingly crowded and competitive field.

0:35Jasmine Enberg: So everyone just thinks that they're a writer now? I do think it's going to reach critical mass pretty soon, and it's going to be harder to stand out. So if you're not in this game now, you're going to start. In today's episode, we also interview Beehive CEO and co-founder Tyler Dank about the state of the industry.

0:56Jasmine Enberg: Hi, Jasmine. Hi, Kaya. And hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into Scalable, our weekly show about the business of the creator economy. It feels like everybody has a newsletter these days. And for the top writers, it's turned into a booming business. Substack, which is synonymous with newsletters, says 100 ,000 writers globally are now making money on the platform. That's double what it was 18 months ago. And more than 50 people are now making over a million dollars a year on Substack. While 50 people admittedly isn't all that much, it is an enormous sum for those 50 people for what is at its core an email product.

1:33Jasmine Enberg: And it's not just upstackers. Here's how much Tyler Dank, the CEO and co-founder of Beehive, a newsletter platform, says his newsletter called Big Desk Energy makes annually. My newsletter makes like$300 ,000 or$400 ,000 a year as a six-hour side project. Tyler is our guest later in the episode. He joins us to talk about the state of the newsletter industry, Beehive's business, and where he sees things going next. disclaimer, we host the scalable newsletter on Beehive. And we'll talk a little bit more about why we chose the platform later in the episode. Okay. But if you're thinking, well, Tyler is the CEO of a newsletter company, that's not a fair example.

2:04Jasmine Enberg: You would be right. But it's not just Tyler. There's really niche newsletters from less well-known writers that are also doing really well. We have a newsletter that has 10 ,000 readers about magicians. It's for magicians, 10 ,000 readers. They make 70 grand a year through subscriptions. Okay, side note, Kaya, I am shook that there are 10 ,000 people who want to read about magic and that some of them are paying for it because I once had to be a magician's assistant at a work holiday party and I am still not over it. I would have paid to see that. I'm really sad I missed that. For me, magic gives similar energy to clowns.

2:40Jasmine Enberg: I'm really sorry. But good news, this newsletter is not for you. It seems largely aimed at other magicians, maybe professional magicians. It's true. And I think it just goes to show that there is a newsletter for literally everything these days. There are also plenty of other newsletter providers out there. There's Kit, there's Patreon, there's Ghost, there's also good old fashioned WordPress, which I used to love and MailChimp, of course. And as newsletters have become more popular, the competition between all these companies has gotten really weirdly intense, I would say. In our conversation with Tyler, even, he took a swipe at both Substack and Patreon for their business models, which take a cut of creators' earnings.

3:19Jasmine Enberg: Beehive, on the other hand, makes money by charging creators a subscription fee to use the service. And I don't think it's uncommon to swipe at competitors in an interview, but like this has spilled out on social media, like this is spilled out in marketing campaigns. It's always interesting to look at the startup subsectors that just have the most competition, and newsletters for some reason have become one of them. And it's also, of course, it's not just newsletters or startups. Like, I mean, you've seen Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk take swipes at each other. Like, do you remember when they were going to fight in a cage match at some place?

3:49Jasmine Enberg: Which never materialized, thank God. Thank goodness. Here's what Tyler said in the interview. I think both Patreon, Substack, and a lot of other creator businesses have built these predatory take rates that typically only go up in one direction, right? Patreon was lesser before. Now it's 10 to 12%. All of these take rate businesses eventually meet a point where they need to make more revenue. And the only lever they have is by increasing the take rate. So that's obviously Tyler's take. He's right about Patreon's rate going up. Last year it raised rates for new creators to 10%, but existing creators who previously had an 8 % rate were grandfathered in.

4:22Jasmine Enberg: So anyway, we reached out to both platforms for their reactions on this. Neither could resist the opportunity to take a little swipe back, including noting that their platforms are free to use. Substack said that on average, creators earn about nine times what Substack earns in fees and said that, quote, our model is designed to align our success with creators' success. We only make money when they do. Patreon said something similar. They said that our business model is fundamentally aligned with creators' businesses in a way that ad-supported or flat-fee platforms aren't. We also asked some of the top newsletter companies who they consider to be their biggest competitors.

4:54Jasmine Enberg: The results might surprise you. They also show that the newsletter market is now much bigger than just newsletters, as we've already alluded to. It's video, it's podcasting, it's events, it's community. I mean, Patreon isn't originally a newsletter platform. Yeah, it's true. But before we go there, we're going to talk about the good, the bad, and the unknown with newsletters. I will start. So obviously, I'm a big proponent of newsletters. I've been writing one since 2021, and I subscribe to more than I can count. Obviously, email isn't the hottest type of content out there, but I do think it's one of the most reliable ways to reach people.

5:26Jasmine Enberg: You're going directly to people's inboxes. There's an intimacy there, similarly to podcasts and being in someone's ear. And importantly, you have their email address and it's self-selected instead of just being served up to you at whim on a social feed. So I think these are some of the factors that's making it so attractive to creators, brands, and independent journalists. I agree with all of that. I also love newsletters. I mean, we have one and I would not be writing one if I didn't believe in it. But I also think that we're at peak newsletter hype right now. And it feels like when everybody was launching a podcast and the reality is that not everybody should have a newsletter, just like not everyone should have a podcast.

6:03Jasmine Enberg: And the newsletter writers that are typically making bank aren't doing so just from their writing alone. And people are starting to get a little bit more selective over what newsletters and how many newsletters they're subscribing to. So I think the bar for content is starting to rise. I mean, you're in people's inboxes, so it better be good. Yeah. So clearly we have a lot of opinions on this. But starting with your point about us being at Peak Newsletter, so many celebrities now have their own newsletters from Charlie XCX to Matthew McConaughey, Dua Lipa, Tom Brady, and brands are also getting in on the action, which is always a clear sign of things getting saturated, including American Eagle and Rare Beauty.

6:40Jasmine Enberg: As we started doing some more research for this episode, my Reels feed suddenly started serving me nonstop videos about how great newsletters are, how many creators are making money from them, and it's just been filled with newsletter propaganda ever since. Here's one example from a creator who goes by the handle Lazy Millionaire. So everyone just thinks that they're a writer now and that they can just join Substack and write about whatever they want and start making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Like they really believe that random people all over the world are going to pay them every single month to read their thoughts and opinions.

7:12Jasmine Enberg: Uh, yeah. And I hope you're one of them. Because how much would that suck in a couple of years? All the people that you were making fun of for jumping on a trend are making like multiple six figures a year just like talking about whatever they want. Look, I mean, both you and I know that it's just not that simple. And it's not to say that you can't make good money from a newsletter. I am definitely not arguing that. But it takes a lot more to turn a newsletter into a booming business than this creator is suggesting. Here's actually a very opposing take from a writer who goes by the handle McKay World on Instagram.

7:44Jasmine Enberg: He compares what he calls, quote, aspirational newsletters to MLMs, better known as pyramid schemes. And he also takes a swipe at Charlie XCX. I don't trust anyone starting a sub-sac in 2026. Yes, that includes my fave Charlie XCX, but we'll get to her in a minute. To become a modern Substack influencer, you have two options. Cash in on a parasocial relationship, or sell an aspirational identity. With the aspirational model, newsletters have become the hottest new MLMs, where writers achieve fame and success by selling bogus roadmaps to fame and success. These all follow the same basic formula.

8:10Jasmine Enberg: Subscribe to my Substack and I'll make you a better blank. That blank could be designer, entrepreneur, content creator, fashion tastemaker, or of course, Substack influencer. This writer with 130 ,000 subscribers explains how easy it is. And you might be like, I'm not a writer. Okay, but do you have thoughts? Do you have hot takes? Do you have opinions? See, not a writer? No problem. Got nothing thoughtful to say? Perfect. Nobody wants to read that shit anyway. All it takes is an inspiring headline and stories of your own success to convince thousands of readers to pay up. In a world where breaking through feels increasingly impossible, these writers promise that realizing your dreams is just a matter of subscribing to the right newsletter.

8:40Jasmine Enberg: Okay, anyway, let's break this down a little bit. And it can depend, obviously, on the newsletter, but a rule of thumb in the past has been that 10 ,000 subscribers is the right number to start monetizing around. But you don't just magically get to 10 ,000 subscribers. I mean, for one, there isn't a discovery mechanism for newsletters the way that there is on social media. Not saying that it's easy to get discovered on social either, but the likelihood that people are going to find your newsletter if you don't already have an established presence elsewhere is pretty slim. And even once you do get to 10 ,000, not all of those readers are going to want to pay for it.

9:15Jasmine Enberg: Yeah, and some platforms are trying to solve for that. So Substack has a social-like feed, and it has an ability for creators to recommend other newsletters to their audiences, which has helped creators grow a lot. I mean, Beehive also has a recommendation system, which has helped grow our subscribers quite significantly. But it can still only get you so far. And to your point, we also both had sizable audiences and personal brands when we launched Scalable. So you'd been writing reports that were emailed to subscribers. I'd been writing a newsletter. So people were also used to seeing us in their inboxes and expected that.

9:45Jasmine Enberg: I think that's a very different thing for a TikTok creator or a long-form YouTube creator. Right. And that's not to say that you can't start from scratch and build a sizable or sustainable audience, but it will take much longer. And the success rate is likely much smaller than some of these creators have made it seem. I mean, take Emily Sundberg. She writes a popular business and culture sub-stack newsletter called Feed Me, which the New York Times described as, quote, where the dealmakers and strivers get their gossip in a profile on her from February 2025. Sunberg has a purple checkmark on Substack, which means she has at least 10 ,000 paying subscribers.

10:21Jasmine Enberg: Some unverified estimates that we found actually put Feed Me's total readership, including free subscribers, at over 150 ,000. So obviously, she's huge, and she's likely doing very well for herself. For context, she charges about$10 a month or$80 annually. So if you do some back of the napkin math, you can figure out kind of what she's making from the newsletter there. And that, of course, doesn't include any of her brand partnership deals. But Emily Sundberg did not get there overnight. She's been writing Feed Me since 2021. Yeah, and she also has bigger ambitions for Feed Me that go beyond just the newsletter.

10:56Jasmine Enberg: Here's what she said in an interview with Subsec co-founder Hamish McKenzie in May. I think about Feed Me as a studio. There is a newsletter. There's merch. There are events. There are podcasts. There could be a movie. There could be a lot of things.

11:11Jasmine Enberg: It's all mine. So if I wanted to turn the lights off tomorrow and do something totally different, I could also. But yeah, that's sort of the direction it's going in. I think this is not very different from how many of the top social media creators think about their businesses as well. And it just goes to show you that newsletters are not just newsletters anymore. We reported and did a column on this back in November, and it's been so interesting to kind of see it play out since then. And how newsletter platforms have also been both driving and adapting to those changes. Beehive on Thursday launched a new community product along with some other features, including programmatic ads and an AI assistant that's embedded within Beehive.

11:47Jasmine Enberg: And that follows its launch of podcasts, the ability to sell digital products and other features last fall. But the community product was really the biggest announcement. It allows writers to launch branded communities for their subscribers. Here's what Tyler said about that feature. If you think of these different content creators who have been creating podcasts and emailing their lists of 20, 30 ,000 subscribers, and they've aggregated an audience of people who really care about the content that they're creating, and they're reaching them reliably through email. But the thing that all of these people in the audience have is a common interest in the types of content that they are consuming, and also, in many cases, the creator behind that content.

12:28And so community just gives these creators an opportunity to create a space where these people who have similar interests can come together and provide value to one another. Right now, podcasts and newsletters are one to many.

12:40Jasmine Enberg: So there are plenty of options for creators who want to run communities. There is Discord, Instagram and other social platforms have been rolling stuff out. There's Patreon, Slack, Facebook groups. And then there's also entirely dedicated companies to community like Mighty Networks and Circle. Substack has also created a sense of community with its own app and has added more social features. So Beehive has a big number of competitors here. But to zoom out, like what Beehive seems to be betting on is that it can win by becoming an all-in-one platform where you don't need to have all these other services, right?

13:12Jasmine Enberg: You don't need Beehive as your newsletter CMS, and then you use a different service for community and another one to sell products and all that kind of stuff, or another to distribute your podcast. And other competitors like Kit have also added other features like the ability to sell digital products. And Patreon obviously has also added newsletters, and it was more of a community membership platform. So you're seeing this approach across the board where it started where all of these different startups flooded the market and tried to kind of capture a piece of the creator economy. And now they're like, OK, how do I win?

13:41Jasmine Enberg: And it's trying to bring everything under one umbrella. And to your point about VHive, it tends to describe itself as Shopify, meaning that it provides the infrastructure for newsletters. And you don't really know when a newsletter is hosted there. that is very different from Substack, which is always really clearly branded. I mean, people even call newsletters Substacks. We don't call them beehives. And that is great for Substack's business and its brand. But it's also one reason that we decided to go with Beehive instead of Substack. I mean, we wanted the scalable brand to be the one that was front and center.

14:11Jasmine Enberg: Anyway, speaking of Substack, it has recently been focused on two things as it builds out its business. So brand partnerships is the first and international expansion. And the latter makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's already so big here. It's already really big as well in the UK. So it's looking for its next area of growth. And the countries that it's targeting include other English-speaking countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But it's also been hiring partnership leads in countries from Brazil to the Nordics. And that's all coming after the company raised$100 million in Series C funding last year.

14:44Jasmine Enberg: And this is common tech playbook. And Substack is actually doing something else that a lot of tech platforms do. It said for a long time that it wouldn't bring ads onto the platform, but like Netflix and so many others, it has since changed its tune. The lesson here is to never say never because clearly these companies go back and advertising is always the answer, it seems, for expansion for many of these companies. Yeah, and to be fair to Substack, It doesn't have an ad network the way that Beehive does, but it did just launch a sponsorship program that connects individual creators with brands, including Balenciaga, Uber, and T-Mobile.

15:22Jasmine Enberg: And the company has brought on a former PayPal ads executive, Dan Robbins, to run that business. So you can see how seriously they are taking it. And, you know, to your point, Kaya, like this was bound to happen. Subscriptions can only get writers and Substack as a business so far. Like there's only so many newsletters that people are going to be willing to pay for, which I think speaks to my earlier point too about people being more selective about what newsletters and how many newsletters they're subscribing to. Yeah, brands just are always where the big money is. And we say this all the time on the podcast and elsewhere, but sponsorships are the top revenue streams in the creator economy, and you can't resist them forever.

15:59Jasmine Enberg: But what else has been so interesting about Substack and other newsletter platforms growth is that a lot of it has been driven by turmoil in the media business. I mean, so many traditional journalists have gone independent, either by choice like me or because they've unfortunately been laid off. But it's not so simple as an independent journalist to take that leap. Sure, you can start your own newsletter in a matter of minutes. That's the easy part. But many independent journalists shouldn't, won't, or can't. I mean, it's inherently risky to go independent. Some people struggle with consistency.

16:26Jasmine Enberg: Others, depending on the type of work they do, will have a hard time earning a sustainable living. There's questions of like healthcare and all these other costs you have to take on. But I think investigative journalism is kind of the prime example, right? It's super hard to monetize. It takes so much time, resources, legal support, travel. Building a business model around that is incredibly challenging. Former CNN anchor Don Lemon talked about what it takes to go independent on last week's episode. Take a listen. Legacy media is contracting. The business model is contracting. So they're going to be and people are going to get laid off.

16:53So you will see others who are going to come into this space. It ain't easy, y 'all. So get ready for it. It can be done. You have to be relentless and you have to work hard. It's hard, hard, hard work. A lot of people think, well, you know, I used to do an hour news every night or two hours live or three or whatever it is. And it's like, that ain't nothing. That's easy compared to I know that's bad grammar. That's easy compared to the work that you have to do in order to have a sustainable, successful and profitable independent media company.

17:25Jasmine Enberg: Going independent also comes with new risks and challenges. I mean, earlier this year, Lemon was arrested while covering an ICE protest at a church in Minnesota. We asked him about that experience and whether he wished he had the support of CNN in that moment. Well, of course, because when you're in, you know, legacy media like that, their lawyers are your lawyers, right? Their PR person is your PR person. Their resources are your resources, not in independent media. Yeah. And looking beyond journalists, another big reason why creators are leaning into newsletters right now is because it lets them own their audience.

17:58Jasmine Enberg: And you don't own your audience on social media. So if you lose access to your account or the platform goes down, you just have no way of reaching people. And virtually every newsletter service now lets you take your list with you if you want to switch services, except for LinkedIn. But social media has just gotten so crowded and it's harder and harder to break through and keep up with the algorithm. And with newsletters, you of course have that direct line to your audience. Like we've said a couple of times already, you're directly in people's inboxes. And they obviously offer another revenue source for creators through sponsorships or by charging readers.

18:28Jasmine Enberg: and subscriptions may not be a lot of money unless you have a ton of subscribers. But on the plus side, they're less volatile. They're also recurring revenue. It's not dependent on the whims of social platforms or brands. And that's really attractive for creators. Newsletters seem to be working particularly well for fashion creators lately, with influencers saying how quickly they're growing and earning money from their newsletters. Here's what influencer and former reality TV star Morgan Stewart had to say about her own newsletter. Started the Substack. Granted, I have a large following, but like that has given me a serious chunk of extra cash for like very minimal effort.

19:03Jasmine Enberg: OK, but back to media for a second, because with so many journalists now having gone independent, it really just is such a crowded market. And we asked Substack where they thought there was still white space for newsletters. And what they pointed to was actually local news, which honestly makes a ton of sense. I mean, local news is one of the few areas of cable TV that's still doing relatively well, which means there's clearly appetite for it. But newspapers and other local outlets have really suffered, and that brings an opportunity for independent newsletters. And Substack also pointed us to two local news publications that are doing really well on the platform.

19:35Jasmine Enberg: That includes Bowen Bulletin and East Side Rag. Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting because Axios is one of the few media organizations that's really leaned into local news with newsletters. But I think there's also a huge opportunity for independent creators here, too. AI is another white space. I mean, that might seem counterintuitive since there are so many publications focused on AI. There's so much hype. There's so many creators focused on it. But there's also so many different angles that people can tackle with AI. Tyler had a few ideas. I think there's so many like tangential topics off of AI specifically, right?

20:05Like at first it was like, what's the news happening in AI? But now there's like this whole subset of how do you use AI as an employee? How do you use AI as a student? How do you use AI as an employee at XYZ company?

20:17Jasmine Enberg: Okay, that leads us nicely into some of the unknowns about the future of newsletters. The first is obviously how AI is disrupting literally everything for both good and bad. I mean, people are getting their information in different ways now, including through LLMs, which just summarize other people's work that they found online and don't always attribute or drive people to become subscribers. At the same time, though, we have been seeing some new subscribers coming in from ChatGPT and from Claude. It's only a few a week, but it is something. And I think that shows how LLMs can also become a new discovery mechanism for newsletters and for creators more broadly.

20:54Jasmine Enberg: Yeah, we'd love to see that number go up a little bit. But we also just want more information about how we're showing up. How is our content being used? How is it showing up? What questions are people asking where we're showing up, right? Like, there's just so many questions. Plus, are we getting credited? Are there more times where AI is ripping off our content? We don't know. Beehive and Patreon just announced separate partnerships with Cloudflare, which give writers more control over whether LLMs can scrape their content. So that's sort of an interesting tidbit there too. But there's also just the question of what are newsletters even anymore?

21:24Jasmine Enberg: With all these companies rolling out tools that go beyond writing from podcast to embedded video to community features, like all the lines are blurring so much. And just the fact that Patreon, right, got into the space is a signal of that. And LinkedIn too. I mean, they have newsletters as well, but that's a perfect segue into what each of these platforms sees as their biggest competition. And what was so telling was that when we asked Substack, they actually picked YouTube and not another newsletter platform. And here's how co-founder and CEO Chris Best put it recently. He said, quote, in the long run, our biggest competitor is YouTube because YouTube has the internet scale network that aggregates the attention and helps you find the things you want.

22:02Jasmine Enberg: And they have a model that actually pays the people that make the thing. He's talking about AdSense here. I find this to be a little bit of a stretch, although it is true that everybody is competing with everyone for attention and revenue these days. And the reality is that Substack obviously does also see Beehive as a competitor. I mean, they have an entire webpage dedicated to what makes Beehive different from Substack. So clearly they do see them as competing in the same space. I saw that with Ghost as well. They have actually per platform, like it says, like Ghost versus this platform. So I think the competition is just very fierce across the board here.

22:37Jasmine Enberg: We spoke with Kit as well, and a spokesperson told us that Substack is the largest email newsletter platform in the creator economy, with Kit following as a close second, and that they cited to a recent fable and GBT 5.6 query, very specific. Kit's founder and CEO, Nathan Berry, also believes, though, that Kit and Substack are building very different products. And that's not all that different from Tyler's answer for Beehive's biggest competitor, which he shares later on the show. It's worth noting that Kit and Beehive both are SaaS platforms versus taking a take rate. And finally, there's Patreon.

23:08Jasmine Enberg: It did not name drop. Instead, a spokesperson told us, quote, there's not a real apples to apples comparison. Most platforms made their name in one media format and are now trying to branch into others. And all these writers are competing with each other too. I mean, we have to wonder what happens to the long tail in the end. Like the big writers are getting bigger and expanding their businesses. And that's got to be squeezing some of the smaller writers or at least making it harder for them to break through and earn money. Here's Don Lemon again on this. I do think it's going to reach critical mass pretty soon.

23:37And it's going to be harder to stand out. So if you're not in this game now, you're going to start.

23:44Jasmine Enberg: So he's talking about the independent media industry more broadly, but it applies to newsletters specifically too. And for what it's worth, he was rushing to get his Substack newsletter published right as we sat down to talk to him. And totally. I mean, I think while email is a much more reliable way to reach audiences and social media algorithms, writers like us also see its limitation. Newsletters are not foolproof. They can get lost in people's spam folders, but also because you're in people's inboxes, hopefully in the right one, the bar for content, I think is pretty high. And it's really hard to put out a newsletter, a good newsletter twice a week.

24:16Jasmine Enberg: I mean, trust us, we do this on a weekly basis. I used to write a newsletter four days a week, which I don't even know. It was a lot. But I will say that it helped my growth a lot at the time. And you didn't have a podcast to do. That's true. Either way, there is a reason that email newsletters have been around since the 1990s. I think they will remain one of the most reliable and effective ways to reach people and build a community around your work. I mean, writing a newsletter is what really propelled my own career and personal brand. So even with all these challenges, I'm really bullish on their potential.

24:49Jasmine Enberg: And I believe in newsletters too. Like I said earlier, I wouldn't be writing one if I didn't think the future was bright for newsletters overall and for ours specifically. And you're right. I mean, email has long been one of the most reliable and sustainable forms of marketing and distribution. And I actually think it's just going to be so much more important as our other media platforms become more and more algorithmically driven. Now it's time for a conversation with Tyler Denk, CEO and co-founder of Beehive. Hi, Tyler. Welcome to Scalable. Thanks for being here. Hello. Thank you for having me.

25:19Jasmine Enberg: So I'd love to get your pulse on kind of the newsletter industry. We've seen all sorts of newsletter providers roll out video, all sorts of other, you've done paid products. So newsletters in general aren't just newsletters anymore, right? When we launched scalable. It wasn't just a newsletter. It was a podcast, an event, all these other things. So talk about what's happening in the industry and why everyone's doing that. I think what you said, you were like, when we launched scalable, it wasn't just a newsletter. I think the most successful content creators today are going multi-channel. You can't be just video, can't be just podcast.

25:50You can't be just newsletter. The most successful creators have a little bit of all of that, which I think is reflected in our roadmap. So we started our bread and butter and still is newsletters. What content creators want today in 2026, it's to be multi-channel and the consolidation of not having to log into four or five different software platforms, understand what's working, what's not and who your audience is. I think convenience is like a huge factor here.

26:13Jasmine Enberg: Do you think you can have a successful business just with a newsletter today? I mean, the answer is yes, because we see it all the time. And I mean, everything from these large AI newsletters that are on our platform. I mean, there's so many examples. I mean, but then you see, you know, Morning Brew is a newsletter for four years until they eventually started launching podcasts and then doing like different types of content. It's the same with the scam, right? I look at Morning Brew and the scam is like the quintessential like OG newsletter companies and even Axios, right? Like those big, those are the big three in my mind when I think of like OG newsletter and all of them have gotten into events, podcasts, video, social.

26:46It depends what success is. We have so many newsletters that are very successful by every measure that are just newsletter, but we're building for like kind of the top 1 % of content creators as well.

26:55Jasmine Enberg: How do you assess the quality of subscribers? We have a very B2B, 45 % of our readers are executives and founders. So that's a really compelling story that we can bring to sponsors as well. So like, how do you quantify? I think there's this whole conversation now about like follower counts and what matters and what doesn't, but like, how do you assess that? We're almost at 15 ,000 scalable newsletter subscribers. Like how does that compare to like a hundred K for like a food newsletter? It doesn't, which is like why it's like important to realize, like I just pulled this data the other day, but we have a newsletter that has 10 ,000 readers about magicians.

27:28It's four magicians, 10 ,000 readers. They make 70 grand a year through subscriptions. And there's such power in niche audiences where it used to be, oh, the scam has 4 million readers and Morning Brew has 2 million and you're selling scale. You can sell scale. And there's plenty of publishers that sell that I have a massive audience. There's other publishers and content creators that say, I have the audience for CMOs, for marketers, for fashion. And knowing what game you're in is like really important. And then if you flip it, it's like from the advertiser perspective, like where can they go to reach that audience?

28:02And like how competitive can you be there? And if you say that you have a very engaged audience and there's other ways to quantify that as well, like what data do you have on them? Are they showing up to events? Very surface level is open rate and click-through rate. It's like if Scalable hosts an event in LA, We did. How many people click to RSVP to apply to sign up? Because those are people that I would say transition from subscribers to fans. And that's really what you want to monetize.

28:28Jasmine Enberg: So you write your own newsletter also, Big Desk Energy. Great name. What have you learned from writing your own newsletter? It's hard. My Saturday night in Paris was spent in the hotel room alone till midnight writing my newsletter, which is not how I would have preferred to spend a Saturday night in Paris. But it's a grind. I was in denial initially thinking it could be like a fun little side project that I spend a little bit of time on. It takes five to six hours every week and it's really hard. But I'd say the flip side of that, it's the most rewarding thing that I do on so many different levels.

28:58One, I have so many founders that respond to me saying, I've implemented XYZ strategy that you talked about and it's totally transformed the company, which is like very fulfilling to hear. We've gotten so much business like secondhand from the newsletter. So the story that I always give is one of our largest enterprise customers is Time. Time CTO signed up for Big Desk Energy like a year and a half ago with no relation to me or Beehive.

29:24Jasmine Enberg: Do you know how he found it? No, no idea. But he just like somehow the CTO of Time stumbled into Big Desk Energy, signed up to it, read the content, understood who I was, what we're building, the values and the things that we care about. and resonated enough to be able to make a case internally to time to migrate all of their newsletters over to our platform. And that turned into a huge enterprise deal for you. So I think, I mean, it's the bull case on like the creator economy and especially creator with a business attached to it. Even though I don't know if I consider myself a creator. Everyone's a creator now.

29:54Everyone's a creator today. But yeah, it's been so, so rewarding and it's opened so many doors for me and the business.

30:00Jasmine Enberg: Does it also help you kind of understand the pain points better? I think Adam Masseri has talked a lot about this. He does so many Instagram videos. He's become kind of a creator. And I think often like his team tells me, they're like, oh, then we get like a request because Adam's like, oh, well, what if we pick this? I mean, dog fooding, I'm the biggest fan of, right? So I'm in the platform every day, a few hours a day. I write my newsletter six hours a week. I'm using the automations. Like I am a beehive power user. And so when things frustrate me and I run the product team and I have a direct line to every engineer and I know exactly who built what, like that's part of the reason why we do move so quickly is I can feel the pain points and escalate them very quickly.

30:38But our whole team actually dogfoods the product. Almost every team lead sends like a monthly recap email to the team. I'd say about like a fifth of the company actually has a side project newsletter that they send, which is we have so much active feedback coming from users, but also our own employees. And it's so easy to escalate them and improve the platform.

30:56Jasmine Enberg: I want to talk a little bit about the competition. You've likened yourself to Shopify and Substack to Amazon. So explain what that means. Because oftentimes you guys are put head to head. Yeah, we are put head to head a lot, which is interesting because outside of both starting with newsletters and launching roughly around the same time, I think the direction that they're moving in and the direction we're moving in are two totally different directions. There are millions of third party sellers on Amazon. But when you go to Amazon, you don't always know who you're buying from. You go to the Amazon.com website.

31:27You go to the Amazon app. If you have customer support, you go through the Amazon support. It shows up in an Amazon box. They have totally intermediated themselves between the provider of goods and the customer. You become overly dependent on the Amazon machine, which they can give or take away, which is true of every distribution platform. And they own a lot of the data and don't surface it back to the brands to know who their customers actually are. The reason why a lot of people don't sell on Amazon is if you go direct, you know their email, their name, their address, their buying behavior.

31:57So you can retarget them. But you can't do that on Amazon. Shopify is tools and infrastructure. You could be buying stuff on, I guess, Allbirds was the example I always gave, but now they pivoted and that's no longer a great example. But you could be on Allbirds' website and not even know that it was built on Shopify. They're just the backend tools and infrastructure.

32:15Jasmine Enberg: I mean, that's how I feel about our website. Totally. We want people to go on Scalable and not know that it was built by Beehive because it shouldn't be. It's your company. It's your brand. We don't want to intermediate between that. And so that's where the analogy is. I see very much Substack is you have to download the Substack app. They decide what content gets proliferated in their algorithm, in their app. They have so much data on readers that they do not share with the content creators. And they might promote your content today, but there's no guarantee that they'll continue to promote your content.

32:43Or they have competing content that maybe they have a better take rate with another creator in your same category that they would favor over you because they make more money. And so there's a lot of misaligned incentives when you become overly dependent and they intermediate entirely between the writer and the audience. Again, we're tools and infrastructure. There's no algorithm. We give you all of the data possible. We make it easy to port your data. Like if we ever messed up and you wanted to leave Beehive, you can take all of your subscriber data and everything to any platform that you want.

33:11Jasmine Enberg: But you can get all the subsets too. Kind of. With an asterisk. One, they don't give you all the data. And two, because they have this Apple in-app payment, Apple payments don't transfer. So if you have, let's say you have 100 paying subscribers and 20 are using Apple, if you wanted to migrate to Beehive, those 20 on Apple would not come with you. But that's more of an Apple problem. Like it's a sub stack problem that they're using Apple, but that's Apple gatekeeping. It's Apple gatekeeping, but that is also part of like being an app and having like an intermediary. If we don't want to pick on sub stack, we can pick on Patreon.

33:40Patreon has had a business with all these paid podcasts. You cannot move your paying subscribers on Patreon to another platform. And like that is this pure creator lock-in. And I think creator lock-in is the worst thing you can do for as a platform. Because who's to say that Patreon's around for the next three to four years? What's to say they don't have layoffs and they are not investing in the areas that you need as a creator? And if you actually cannot move your data and your content and you're paying subscribers to another platform, you're totally beholden to a platform and their success, their priority is their roadmap.

34:14Jasmine Enberg: And as you're building out podcasting and all these other things, is that the case for BeHive? Data portability, 100%. We're built on top of Stripe. You can port it over to other platforms. Like, that's very intentional. All the data we make. I'm not going to launch an app anytime. We're not launching an app, exactly. And there's other aspects too, like we don't take a take rate, right? Like I think both Patreon, Substack, and a lot of other creator businesses have built these predatory take rates that typically only go up in one direction, right? Patreon was lesser before. Now it's 10 to 12%.

34:46All of these take rate businesses eventually meet a point where they need to make more revenue. And the only lever they have is by increasing the take rate. And so we're the only platform, whether it's paid subscriptions, digital products, webinars, like we don't take a cut of revenue from our users. So the combination of not taking a cut of revenue, of making it easy to port your data in different places, and then the all-in-one. And the other caveat is like an open platform as well. Both Patreon, Substack, and a lot of these other platforms don't allow you to connect with third parties. So if you have like a Slack community or you use whatever XYZ tool for your business, you should be able to use an API and a webhook to sync your business together.

35:26They operate in closed ecosystems. So you are only as good as the roadmap that they're willing to give you. And I think that also fundamentally limits what you can do on those platforms.

35:35Jasmine Enberg: So who is your biggest competitor? I would say it's Substack, even though you play in different ones. I think you still compete with them for writers. For sure. And we do. And customers, yeah. I do. I mean, when I said we're going in different directions, we're still very much in a similar ballpark, but diverging, I think, pretty quickly. But I mean, you would also probably say Shopify's biggest competitor, still Amazon. And I think if anything, that is a sign that there can be two players with two totally different ideologies, both succeed at a massive scale. I would have loved to be a shareholder of both Shopify and Amazon for the past 20 years.

36:10And so like, is there a world where we coexist? Like, I totally think that's possible.

36:14Jasmine Enberg: What's your advice for someone who wants to start a newsletter today? I mean, it feels like every part of the creator economy is so crowded and competitive, but are there certain areas, strategies, things that are untapped still? I mean, Magician Newsletter is a new one for me. Yeah, crazy. I love that example because we're such big, like one thing that I think Beehive does really well is like democratizes access to the long tail of content creators, which is where I was going to go with this answer. Like you don't have to be mainstream business news or crypto or AI. You really just want to find a topic that you're passionate about, that you can enjoy creating content and serve an audience better than other people.

36:48And so I think like where most people get caught up is they would think themselves into a pretzel of how do I build a market? What's like to go to market for the next six months? How do I get advertisers? Like just getting started and taking things one step at a time, figuring out what you like creating content, who you can create content for. I think value starts to surface as you go on that journey. But I think most people don't ever get started on that journey because they can't see a viable path towards profitability or revenue. And I think that's probably the wrong way to think about it.

37:19Jasmine Enberg: If there are a certain threshold that you need to hit, like, is it 10 ,000 subscribers? Is there a certain number or way you have to hit to be like, okay, this is working and I can actually monetize this now? Or can you monetize with like 50? I would say like way back when, pre-Beehive, like the answer I would always give is like 10 ,000. Because like you need enough where a advertiser or marketer at a company would at least pay attention to you that they would sponsor your newsletter. or enough that if you could convert two to 3 % of them into a paying subscriber that you could build like a healthy subscription business.

37:48But with Beehive, like to talk her own book, like you can monetize day one. You don't need a large audience, but you can use the Beehive ad network and monetize your first send with 15 readers.

37:59Jasmine Enberg: But you're not going to make a lot of money doing that. Not going to make a ton of money yet, but like I think making some money and building momentum is really what you need to get started. Paid subscriptions, like you could have a hundred readers. And if 80 of them are paying you tens, hundreds of dollars per month, like there's a business to be had there. Are there any areas that are untapped? I mean, one thing that I've seen is this rise of AI focused content, right? Which we didn't see a few years ago and really helping either people tactically understand AI or more from like a consumer perspective.

38:25Jasmine Enberg: So that's like a new category, right? But are there other things that you're seeing or that you see openings for? I think there's so many like tangential topics off of AI specifically, right? Like at first it was like what's the news happening in AI? But now there's like this whole subset of how do you use AI as an employee? How do you use AI as a student? How do you use AI as an employee at XYZ company? When we first started Beehive, it was 2020, 2021. Crypto was the thing that everyone was writing about. So like the majority of our newsletters were all crypto. And now it's pivoted more into AI.

38:55And so I think it's very reflective of like whatever the it thing is. There's a rush in brand dollars and creators to be able to fill the void of like different content. Right now, it's definitely AI. And I still don't think we're at like saturation just because there's so much news happening with AI. And it's moving so fast. I think what's really interesting is like the combining a very personable brand or creator, like a creator behind information, right? Like Morning Brew for a while was just like a headless brand that was bringing you business news. And then they started to eventually surface more of their content creators and writers.

39:30I think if you can couple like what you and Jasmine are doing, like an actual personality behind value based information, like that combination is really powerful.

39:39Jasmine Enberg: What revenue streams do you think best? Because I personally think that there's a limit to how many individual newsletters someone will pay for. Personally, there's not a ton of newsletters that I pay for. I love newsletters. I consume them a lot. This is also why we didn't launch with a paid strategy for Scalable, not to say we won't ever do it. But like, what are you seeing work best in terms of revenue monetization of newsletters? So our big thesis from day one was we want to build the biggest ad network in the creator economy, probably besides YouTube. We're probably not going to take on YouTube at least anytime soon.

40:09What YouTube did for video, we believe we can do for newsletters. And now that we've launched podcasts and we are bundling monetization for newsletters and podcasts, I think it's beyond just building. What I used to say was we want to build the Facebook ad manager for newsletters, which was a big, ambitious goal. And I actually don't think it was ambitious enough. I think we want to build the Facebook ad manager for creators. And if you've sponsored Scalable and it's worked well, what other tangential creators or publishers are on the Beehive network like Scalable that you can sponsor their website, their newsletter, their podcasts?

40:39And that's the direction that we're building. So I give that context because I agree with you. I think there's a finite limit to how many paid newsletters. But ads work amazing.

40:50Jasmine Enberg: Rachel Carton does a great newsletter, which is paid. and most of it's paywall and you can't access it and social media managers pay for it. But I just think there's few and far between examples. Well, Arthur Darcy is a great example because he makes a ton of money on paid subscriptions. He might make more money on ads. And I think this balance of not being over committed to one business model, but knowing that every publisher and every creator is their own business. I was like, I had breakfast the other day with Cat GPT and she's building an IRL space for builders to come and create content. And she also sells digital products, right?

41:24Like what a creative way to leverage your audience and people who are interested in learning how to use AI, but then bring it IRL as a different revenue stream and then build a physical product. So I think the best creators are not tied to a single business model and willing to experiment.

41:39Jasmine Enberg: So you also rolled out AI tools, like chatbots to automate publishing tasks. Like what, spell this out in plain English. Like what does this actually mean in practice? And like, how is this different from the approaches of other kind of providers and newsletter services? Yeah, I think there's a few things there. I was on a panel in South by and I sat next to this creator who said, I spend five days of my week doing all of the admin work and two days of my week doing creating content. And that feels so backwards to me as a content creator. It should be, if anything, five days creating content and two days doing admin work.

42:11And like, that's where I really see AI playing a big part. It's not that AI is going to write the newsletters, create the podcast and replace everything. And so we have tools in the platform. We recently launched an MCP, which is so powerful.

42:23Jasmine Enberg: What is that? Yeah, let me jargon that. Yeah, let me jargon that. So like, de-jargon is a better way of saying dumb it down. For decades, when you would log into a platform, you sign up, you put in your email and password, and you have a dashboard, and you click through things online. And so you log into the Beehive platform, you look at your data, you build your newsletter. Same with any other platform that you use. And MCP basically just connects those platforms to Codex and ChatGPT or Claude. And it basically moves the interface from the platform to Claude. So if you're anything like me, I'm in Claude, you know, six hours a day.

42:59And I'm constantly chatting with it and doing things through Claude. I can ask Claude, instead of like building a dashboard and figuring out myself, I can ask Claude, who are my most engaged 1000 readers from like this past month? Or who clicked on my ad last week? or what's my best performing ad that I've run in the past month? Whatever you analysts used to do or creators used to do, you can just use AI and it uses the power of the LLMs and access to all of your data to just do things for you. And so I just think there's this shift of more and more work is shifting to be done in Cloud and in these AI tools.

43:33And you can either do one of two things. You can fight that and say, no, I think everyone's always going to log into Beehive. Or you could say, if people are going to move their workflow into Cloud, How do we empower them to do more things where we become the infrastructure layer, but they can do whatever they want in Claude? And I think that'll actually increase usage and be better for us and them.

43:52Jasmine Enberg: We're starting to see some traffic come through ChatGPT. And we just have no information about, like we can tell based on the newsletter, but like we don't know why or what's driving that. I think all brands now are thinking about this where it's like, well, how do we show up in LLM results? And it's a whole new world. But how much do you think about that? And how much of a problem do you think about for Beehive to get involved in? We are announcing a partnership with Cloudflare. Okay. And the goal of that partnership is to give more control to content creators over their content. Right now, all of the big labs from OpenAI to Anthropic to Google to Microsoft are crawling all of this content on the internet millions of times.

44:28Jasmine Enberg: And we're getting like one or two subscribers. Like these are not massive numbers, but I'm happy there's some traffic coming in, but like - And so what's really interesting about this though is like there's two ways to look at it. One is I want more subscribers. Like give me more LLM juice so more people discover me so I can grow. There is the other side of the coin, which is I don't want these LLMs training on my content and my data. And they're never even surfacing, you know, scalable. They're just answering questions about the creator economy from our interviews without me getting any credit.

44:57And so I think it's up to the creator to determine what they want to do with their content. So the partnership we're launching with Cloudflare is you will be able to see every AI bot that crawls your website and your content. And you can see that this is open AI, this is Anthropic, and you can choose to allow it or to block it. And I don't think it's up to us as the platform to say which is right or which is wrong, because every business and creator is very different. But we are giving the control over their content and data to the creator, and we'll be the first ones to do that. And I think it's a really powerful thing.

45:28Jasmine Enberg: How do you ensure that you keep up the quality of the content? Or is that more just like readers have to decide? Because like there was this BI article where they spoke with a beehive writer who has trained Claude to like research, draft, structure articles in his style. And like when Jasmine and I were reading this, we're like, part of us wants to do this, but like, it feels like it's a race to the bottom. And also when I do try to use AI, it's awful. Like it doesn't get my voice. It doesn't do that. And as also a journalist, like I'm a bit allergic to that idea because I'm like, well, I'm a writer and that's what I do.

45:57Yeah, there's definitely a big aversion to it. My opinion is I think it's totally up to the subscribers and the readers and audience to vote with their feet and with their dollars. Right. So if you launch a Friday newsletter that was totally AI generated and I thought it was entertaining and interesting and valuable as I trust you as like the creator that's presenting that and like stamping that.

46:17Jasmine Enberg: Yeah. And if it's valuable to me, I think it's up to me to decide whether I want to remain subscribed to it. If it's total shit content, people will unsubscribe and they won't pay for it. It's our job from like the email perspective to make sure that there's no spam and phishing and like all of the other things that are like legally required. But I think it's up to the readers to decide if they like the content or not. What are like your ambitions? I think you've said you don't need to raise more venture funding, right? That's not in the... We're not looking to raise, seriously. Not looking to raise, but what are the ambitions?

46:44Jasmine Enberg: What's the goal? Wanting to build the Facebook ad manager for creators is such a big, ambitious goal that we are like chipping away at. Right now, the ad network pays out publishers and creators a little bit over a million dollars every month. We're in its infancy. There's so much optimizations to be had there. And we haven't even rolled in podcasts into that. And so the, like how we're kind of positioning the company is like the operating system for content creators right now, if you have a podcast, you sell digital products, you have a community, you have a newsletter, it's four or five different platforms.

47:18They're annoying to manage all five different platforms. You don't know who your audience is. You don't know what's resonating and you can't tie it all together. I do think there's a tremendous value in consolidation. And so my ambitions today, like being completely honest assessment of where we are, best in class in newsletter, podcast is two months old. By the time this podcast comes out, community would be one day old. Yeah. And digital products are like five or six months old. So I'd say we're very early there and have a long way to go. But the vision when we can pull off the maturation that we have in newsletters for all these other products, I truly think is such a one of one opportunity for both brands and creators.

47:55Jasmine Enberg: Do you see like an exit in the future or do you want to remain independent? I think I am the best person to run this company. I think I have a very clear vision of where we want to go, some of which I just laid out. And I think me being in control of the company and continuing to steer the ship is going to position us best for success. But if like someone came to you with a great deal, would you take it? Depends what you mean by great deal, right? It's like if we can still drive this vision and we can accelerate what we want to do with the right partner that helps us accelerate, and it's a win for our users, then I think we're always willing to come to the table and chat.

48:33But right now, I'm so confident in the team and I'm very happy about our roadmap and just looking to continue to execute.

48:39Jasmine Enberg: So where is this all going? Where do you think newsletters are going? Where do you think the industry is headed? It's a big question, but media is changing so fast. there's I don't know what wave we're on of journalists going independent but like where do you see things going still so early right like I think on the journalist front like more and more going independent like yourself and having tremendous success how do you feel being independent oh it's great I mean I'm enjoying it a lot I think I think it's so much of it is what I was already doing so I took like the best parts of my job and then get to do them more on my own terms what were the best parts of your job and what were the worst parts of your job that you left behind.

49:13Jasmine Enberg: I love doing the newsletter and I love doing the event. It's not that they were the worst jobs, but like when you work at a publication, whether it's CNN or the information, there's just certain things you have to do, right? Like there's certain priorities for the company. So, and this is just my priority scale. And I think that story continues to resonate more and more with more people. Just the barriers of entry used to be so high to do this. And we've made it and other competitors in the space have made it so easy to get started. And it's not this like leap of faith of I need to quit my job and make a hundred K salary of people who are doing it in different ways.

49:44Jasmine Enberg: Like, it's not just like, okay, you have to do paid or you have to do this. Like there, I mean, you can do it as a side project. Like, I mean, I don't plan on quitting Beehive anytime soon, but like my newsletter makes like three or$400 ,000 a year as a, as a six hour side project. And like that, I think is like the quintessential example of like what you can build with these tools. If you have an audience and something valuable to say. But like, are we reaching a critical mass? No, I think it'll come in different forms. And like, so we're launching, community, I think maybe like a day before this podcast launches, like, I think we'll see people continue to go deeper.

50:13And there's so many different variations. If AI really does start to displace like some of the everyday tasks that we're doing and people have more leisure time, like, I'm going to butcher the philosophy of like, everyone just wants to be entertained, right? And I think there's actually not like a maximum of amount of video content, podcast content, newsletter, written content.

50:32Jasmine Enberg: But it just gets more competitive, I think. What wouldn't people say hundreds of years ago that we're at peak books, right? Like so many people are writing books. And like, I don't have the data offhand to say are people reading books less today than they were before. But just because more people are becoming authors or creating podcasts or creating video, like I think there will always be a natural rise to the top, like higher quality content will continue to rise to the top. do I think every content creator will be successful? Like, no, that's like the natural, like churning out. So like, is there room to run?

51:04Yes. I think, I don't know, even Kat GPT that I was talking to two days ago, she started a year ago, has 700 ,000 followers. Like she had a like normal job as a chief of staff and is now a full-time content creator and crushing it. So like, how many examples of that are there just waiting? And then maybe AI feels saturated now because we're like three years into this boom cycle. what's to say the next thing isn't quantum computing or IRL this or that there's always going to be a new it thing and there's going to be a rush of content creators and media to

51:35Jasmine Enberg: you know work in that space well thank you Tyler appreciate you coming on this was thank you for letting me sweat through this