How Beehiiv Is Helping Creators Monetize Faster Than Ever with CEO Tyler Denk

0:00Ian Shepherd:Hello my friends and welcome to the business of creators. Today Tyler Denk joins me to break down how Beehive is rewriting the rules of the content economy. We listen to our users and truly lean into what they want. Like our product velocity is second to none. We build features, we ship features very quickly. Last week they dropped the biggest releases in the company's history with a ton of new features. Because every user cares about two things. They want to grow faster and they want to make more money. And if you can build products and tech that enable that, typically users and especially creators are very happy.

0:32And now anyone without any technical background and without more than 10, 15 minutes of time can build an incredible website.

0:39Ian Shepherd:And the advertising partnerships they enable for creators and brands are just as impressive. We now have 3 billion emails going through the platform every single month. I mean, we're just the matchmaker. The platform, every week you get new advertisement opportunities. You don't know anyone at age one and you don't need to. You can actually make money from day one with like a 10-person list. Plus, Tyler is not just building the platform. He's actually using it with his own newsletter, Big Desk Energy. I think the superpower of having the CEO actually using the product on a day-to-day basis, like things get prioritized, they get fixed.

1:09And I think that shows the quality of product that we've been able to share.

1:11Ian Shepherd:keep listening this is one of my favorite conversations of the year

1:21Ian Shepherd:tyler you've said that beehive is becoming the operating system for the content economy what does that mean for a creator yeah i think the reason why we use that language is actually pretty pretty intentional because if when you look at the users that we've served really well we have on one side what you typically consider a creator which is the cody sanchez is the the Hank Greens of the world. So like typical content creators, but we also serve Time, Newsweek, The Ringer, Texas Tribune, like very, very large publishers. And it's not even that we serve one better than the other. We serve both extremely well.

1:53And so like, what's the thing that actually ties them both together? And so that they've built these content-based businesses. And so like the content economy, which we're trademarking, is like this new terminology we're using to actually make it a bit more abstract as to these are people and organizations and publishers who are capable of creating great content, cultivating an audience and being able to monetize and build a full business around that. And so us kind of positioning ourselves, not just a newsletter company and not just a creator economy company, but really the operating system for the content economy, I think is a much broader stance and actually more accurately represents the products and capabilities that we offer.

2:33Ian Shepherd:Very cool. Well, I'm really keen to get into the detail of that. Yeah. Now, yesterday you launched a huge bundle of features all at once. Why was this the moment to go all in? Yeah. I mean, I think something that we do better than anyone else is we listen to our users and truly lean into what they want. And I think you can see that from our reputation and market historically is like our product velocity is second to none. We build features, we ship features very quickly. And if you look through history at all of our product launches, you see in the replies and comments of everyone being like, oh, I've been waiting on this forever.

3:03Like, this is exactly what I've been looking for. And I've seen so many other tech companies miss the mark with launches time and time again. And I think part of that, and I think we'll maybe get to this later with my own personal newsletter. I think about a third of our company actually has a personal newsletter as like a side project. So they are the users. I am our end user. A lot from coming from the Morning Brew background of being the second employee in Morning Brew, like I kind of know what it takes to scale a newsletter. So that's all to say, we've always been very in tune with what our users want.

3:33And as we've launched features, we acquired a website builder last year. We launched this website builder native to our product in July of this year. And the goalposts always move, right? Like first people just wanted a better website builder. Then we acquired one and built one. And they're like, oh, now we want digital products. Now AI is super cool. Now I want all of these other things. Because if you're going to own my website, which is where all my traffic comes, I want to be able to make money. I want to be able to build a better looking website. I want to have opportunities to engage with my audience.

4:01So it really is just like a very gradual process. of we launched the thing that we hear the most. And that always just moves the goalposts into like, oh, we also want these things, which kind of led us to yesterday and what we launched.

4:11Ian Shepherd:Makes sense. And digital products sit at the center of the announcement. What was the gap that you saw there? Yeah, I don't know if it's such a gap because in the sense that, yes, there's a lot of other competitors in the market that also offer selling eBooks and templates and courses and guides. One gap is most of them operate in a take rate model. And I think our ethos is really just putting users, creators, publishers first. And I think the take rate model in a lot of senses are very predatory where we have like a standard flat rate SaaS model that I think is more predictable and better and more like creator friendly.

4:45So we don't take a take rate on paid subscriptions, which is, you know, as opposed to Substack and others in the newsletter space. And then a lot of the digital product providers do take a decently high take rate. So I think just being on the ethos of like what we stand for, we think we can build best in class products and not have a take rate from like the revenue and steal that from our users. But it's less so of like the gap of what others were providing and more our lack of providing more. So we already owned their website and we owned their newsletter. And so now they were stuck between from the perspective of the user, multiple logins.

5:18So I send my audience to XYZ platform to buy digital products for me, but I'm also sending a newsletter over here and actually my website's over here. And so it's like really just like a convoluted experience for the readers and for the content creator. So this bundling of being able to provide really great tech in a single platform, my bet is that the convenience and the quality of products of having everything bundled together is better for the content creator and publisher and better for the audience to have a consistent experience. And so just kind of this natural evolution of consolidation across the ecosystem.

5:52Ian Shepherd:And that commercial model is a great point of differentiation. Can you tell us about some of the features that you launched yesterday? Yeah, so start with digital products. That's like a big one for us because I think my biggest hypothesis of how we can best serve our users is every user cares about two things. They want to grow faster and they want to make more money. And if you can build products and tech that enable that, typically users and especially creators are very happy. Digital products is something we've heard time and time again. We have this like emerging middle class of content creators on the platform who have a subject matter expertise in crypto, AI, sports whatever and they have this loyal fan base and if you can take your expertise and monetize it with ebooks guides or booking time it's a yet another monetization stream for these content creators and publishers so that's very exciting to us obviously ai is is exploding in popularity and and of finding different use cases for different products there's been this like vibe coding movement over the past like 12 to 18 months where previously if you back up a decade like very high barrier to entry very high friction to build a website because you needed either technical skills you needed to learn yourself how to code or you had to like hire someone to build this website for you then there was like this like movement of an introduction of these website builders which are like drag and drop they help they're very templated and that's kind of like the paradigm that we were previously.

7:18And then the most recent paradigm is just describe what you want with English, or even take a screenshot of your favorite website and add it in and tweak it how you want. And now anyone without any technical background and without more than 10, 15 minutes of time can build an incredible website. And so again, it's really just listening to users and like, yes, we acquired this website builder. They actually had an AI native website feature as well. Can we just take that? And what the market is dictating is like drag and drop takes two hours. I just want to describe in two minutes. And so that's kind of like how we were thinking about that.

7:49So the digital products and AI is great. And then I mean, I could keep going down the list because we launched so many things, but like podcasts are just an extension of like our core consumer and user also has a podcast in many cases. And so where do you send your audience to listen to that podcast? Is it Apple? Is it Spotify? We basically built like a pod page where it centralizes all of your podcast episodes. and then website analytics are great because most people actually don't feel like going through the Google Analytics, adding a JavaScript pixel, troubleshooting it, logging in, building these funnels.

8:22We just do that for you. And now you have full transparency into your website analytics. So yeah, that's kind of like some of the things that we've been launching and yeah.

8:30Ian Shepherd:Great. And what about advertising on the platform? I know you're looking to build like an ads manager. Can you take us through that? Yeah. So that's always been one of our core differentiators is right now we are one of the few platforms that have a native ad network directly for newsletters. And the way that that works, and really the insight there was when I was at Morning Brew, we were 100 % advertiser based. So Morning Brew made money, they would add a Nike or Visa sponsorship at the top of their newsletter, and they would get paid 50,$60 ,000 percent from the sponsorship dollars. And I saw that one incredible unlock, incredible business model, but it took 20 to 30 ad sellers and brand partners to be able to sell these advertisements.

9:09And when you look at broadly the creator economy, but even just publishers at large, a lot of these creators are a one-person team. And if their goal is to write content about sports, and that's why their followers and fans subscribe to their newsletter, their time is best spent writing about sports and providing that content, not building brand relationships with Nike and Adidas and AG1. So the thinking there is if we have these tens of thousands of newsletters who are incredible at creating content and serving their audience, we now have 3 billion emails going through the platform every single month.

9:42It's a big enough number where you can get the attention of a lot of large advertisers. We have advertisers like Nike, Netflix, Roku, AG1, etc. I mean, we're just the matchmaker. The platform, every week you get new advertisement opportunities. It's totally opt-in. You don't have to run any ads. But if you see the AG1 ad is paying$4 a click and you think your audience would love it, you can add it to your newsletter. You get paid a few weeks later. You don't know anyone at AG1 and you don't need to. So we think it's an incredible value add for publishers. And then for advertisers, you get in front of these very niche audiences.

10:15There's a huge long tail of them that you would have never had any business reaching out to this 2 ,000-person newsletter. And now you just got tons of new customers and conversions from that.

10:24Ian Shepherd:so we really do think it is a win-win very cool very cool and with ads and subscriptions and digital products now all in one place like what's your advice or recommendations for creators on the platform yeah i think the most common question i received when i was at morning brew was like when should i start monetizing my newsletter and it's always such a difficult question to ask because it varies case by case in the audience and the content but typically i'd be like 10 000 subscribers that's like a big enough of a number where some d2c brand might pay attention to you and might throw you a few hundred dollars to sponsor in your newsletter.

10:57With what we've been able to bring to market and we have this other thing called Boost, which is basically like co-registration, but like paid co-registration. Between that and the ad network, you can actually make money from day one with like a 10 person list. So you could sign up your family and your two best friends and add this AG1 sponsorship at the top of your newsletter and get paid out per click or per CPM. And I think a lot of people that like aha moment of making money on the internet for the first time is like a very empowering feeling and the fact that we've basically brought that to as soon as you're as early in your journey as possible and we've built like enterprise level tools that we've kind of democratized for the long tail of content creators as well that is why i think we see the success of like time and newsweek on the platform and content creators who are hobbyists and starting off with 10 subscribers it really is what we built at Morning Brew internally, which I'd consider enterprise grade software and made it affordable and accessible to anyone who wants to launch a newsletter.

11:56Ian Shepherd:Well, I'd love to learn more about Beehive as a company. What's the biggest thing that's changed this year? I mean, everything yesterday changed, right? So that was a big announcement for us. We went from and have always been and still will be at our core. I think newsletter is like the means of communication of owning your audience and distribution and using email as a channel that is free from algorithms and dictating like shadow banning and whether or not your content actually reaches your audience. I think email is an incredibly powerful channel. So email will always be at the core of what we do.

12:28In July, we launched the website builder. So now we were email and website. So more of this comprehensive suite as like a content creator or content business, we can serve you better. And because I do believe the coupling and consolidation is like a huge value add. And then as of yesterday, it's like, oh, we can also do courses and templates and podcasts and so much more. And so you can kind of guess like where we're going from here, but it's a lot of additional consolidation that we think we can serve our users better than anyone else. We think we care more about our users than anyone else. And we think that shows in the product and the velocity.

13:02And I think we'll just continue to make lives easier by using our platform and being able to consolidate best in class tools so you can grow and monetize faster.

13:11Ian Shepherd:And what does that look like in five years from now? I mean, I could keep running down the list, right? So we don't launch, we don't have video yet, but obviously like highly requested. Community is very interesting to us. A lot of our largest publishers and mid-sized content creators are all asking about ways to engage with their community in like a more bi-directional manner. So like community is very interesting. And then the ad network, I think it can be massive. I put in the presentation that we are trying to build the Facebook ad manager for email very ambitious goal but i would love for every d2c the fortune 500 company to be like hey we want more customers we already pay meta a ton of money and we pay google a ton of money but we know newsletters work really well and all of the best content creators kind of live live in their like own niche of content and with their audience beehive is actually the best place to be able to go and sponsor tens of thousands of newsletters at scale i put it very ambitiously in our first ever seed deck when I was raising money.

14:09It's like our real advertisers are Google and Meta because those are where the brand dollars go. And I think that we should be able to compete for those brand dollars. So it's like the advertiser view and brand view of what we're building. But ultimately, if we can make that work, that means there's so much revenue potential for anyone who's using the platform. And where it's emailed today, you can imagine that extending into video and to podcast as well. So really just helping these creators and publishers monetize.

14:34Ian Shepherd:I love that vision there. And I'm curious, What do you think about competitors? So I'm loosely aware of the competitors, but I honestly haven't logged into, if you were to rattle off our top five to 10 competitors, I haven't logged into any of their websites or platforms in probably the past two to three years. I kind of think it's like a losing game to kind of keep track of what everyone's doing in the space. All of the alpha I get is from one, me being a user of the platform and knowing what I want more of me to succeed. And then two, just reading on LinkedIn and X and wherever. what our users are complaining about and what they want more of is like really the only thing that has guided like our entire roadmap for the past four years.

15:14So I have a lot of a lot of conviction that our team is really talented and that our ability to execute is better than most companies out there. And I think when you start comparing like back when I was at Morning Brew, we would always look at the skin because they were a few years older than us, like two to three times bigger than us. But you kind of don't know what's going in as well as I'm like, who's actually calling the shots and are they the right shots and when you blindly follow competitors there you realize that they're just making the same assumptions and guesses that you would be internally as well and i think i trust our team more to make those decisions and serve our users

15:46Ian Shepherd:better great and let's talk about your own newsletter then what have you learned from writing that it's been one of the biggest value adds in my career honestly is writing a newsletter which is like a testament to like one the platform and two like being able to walk the talk um and actually be like, I understand why people are launching newsletters. One, it like pays my rent, right? It's great. Like there's a revenue stream coming in. Two, the doors it has opened as like being more of like a thought leader in this like build in public CEO founder space. I have direct access. I think most of my audience, like 60 to 70 % the last time that I've done a survey are founders.

16:20And those are the people I like. Those are the people that I want to be around. And it's unlocked a ton of doors. So like, for example, one of our largest users on the platform is Time. they came inbound because their CTO read my newsletter so it's like literally just like being myself and being able to show the person behind the brand was able to resonate enough with a decision maker at a massive publisher and that was one of our big like enterprise deals last year and the cascading effect of that is like he actually went to another publisher who recommended who also joined and it just became one of our big enterprise users and then they obviously have their network of friends who have also been recommended onto the platform which I was like poking fun a little bit facetiously that like my newsletter is the reason we've been able to build a lot of this enterprise value but it really does show the power of like having a personal brand and and launching this newsletter and putting my thoughts out into the world so that's like on like the brand building and business side and then just like purely on like the dog shooting and technical side like i write i'm in the platform probably 10 hours a week and so every time something pisses me off or like doesn't look right or whatever like i have a direct slack channel with every engineer to be able to be like, hey, this needs to be fixed.

17:25And it gets fixed right away. So I think the superpower of having the CEO actually using the product on a day-to-day basis, like things get prioritized, they get fixed. And I think that shows them the quality of product that we've been able to share.

17:36Ian Shepherd:That's great. And I'm curious, how do you make time to write the newsletter when you're a CEO of a fast-growing company? It's the bane of my existence. I caveat with like, yes, it's like one of the most rewarding things I've done. Also, anyone who writes a newsletter or has a column that's due weekly knows it like hangs over your head all week that like, oh, I have to carve out time to do it. I mean, I typically work Saturdays and Sundays. So in an ideal world, and I haven't yet this week, it's like Thursday, I spend 30 minutes just shouting down thoughts of what I think I can write about. And then, I mean, you're a writer, so you get this, but you like go back over like every day and like revise it and tweak it and add to it.

18:12And like, I think the more reps that I get at it, the better the final piece is. But the real answer is I usually spend probably eight hours between Saturday and Sunday, writing and editing.

18:20Ian Shepherd:Excellent. Well, it's been great to hear about the release. Before we go, I'm curious, what do you think are the biggest shifts in the creator economy over the next couple of years? Yeah, I think I hinted at it. And if what I predict is any, or what we're doing is any signal of like my thesis of the creator economy, I think there's gonna be massive consolidation over the next 12 to 18 months. I think you're already starting to see it. You've seen companies like Circle expand into website and newsletter. You've seen some LinkedIn bio tools launch email products or partner with email products. You've seen course platforms launch website builders as well.

18:56And then you've seen us go from email primarily to website now to LinkedIn bio and podcast and digital products, whether it's via M &A or just a natural evolution of every company fighting for the same market share and rolling out more and more product lines. I think there's going to be pretty large consolidation. And I think there's going to be a lot of platforms that specialize in like one of those things, whether it's podcast or LinkedIn bio or community, where they're going to realize that that's more of a feature than like a full platform. And that the value of having this consolidation is actually tremendously valuable to these content creators.

19:34So, yeah, consolidation is like my big bet. And that's where I think we are trying to move as quickly as we can to ship new product and serve a larger audience.

19:41Ian Shepherd:Wise words there. Well, Tyler, thank you. It's been great to speak and learn about the new releases and good luck. I look forward to following the journey. Yeah, I appreciate you having me. Excellent. Thanks for listening to the Business of Creators. I've got some big guests coming, so be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Now, if this is your first time listening, I'm Ian Shepard, co-founder and co-CEO of Electrify Video Partners. We invest in large established creator businesses to accelerate their growth. For creators, that means three things. First, the chance to take money off the table today.