Unfazed CEO: Embracing Newsletter Saturation

Newsletter platform beehiiv recently celebrated its four-year anniversary by launching a suite of new features, including an AI website builder, as well as support for podcasts and selling digital products.

In other words, beehiiv is about more than newsletters now. Co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk (who writes a popular startup newsletter of his own) spoke to TechCrunch about why the company has been expanding, explaining that it was largely in response to customer demand, particularly since beehiiv offered very basic blog templates from the start.

“All of our users were like, ‘Hey, this is great, I like using your email stuff, [but] my blog looks like everyone else’s. It’s terrible. It’s not customizable. I want to sell courses. I want to collect leads. I want more flexibility on my website,’” Denk recalled. “So that led us to acquiring TypeDream — they were a YC company to address that need, as people wanted better websites. Then, you know, you give an inch, they ask for a mile.”

This does mean beehiiv is becoming more competitive with other creator platforms, even the ones that weren’t necessarily focused on newsletters. Indeed, Denk predicted that we’ll see more of “this feature creep of consolidation across the creator stack and content stack.”

That doesn’t, however, mean that Denk thinks the opportunities for new newsletters have dried up.

“Quality content will always rise to the top,” he said, and there might be even more opportunity as the social media landscape becomes more fragmented.

Read a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

You’ve repeated this quote that beehiv is “arming the rebels of digital content.” What do you mean by that?

I got the inspiration from the president of Shopify [about] arming the rebels of digital commerce — I think that’s what he said.

The promise of the creator economy is taking power from institutions, giving it to individuals, and allowing them to succeed. Going back through who actually had the means of distribution and power previously, and now this new distributed, independent media world, where a lot of people go to their favorite podcasters or content creators for information, where it used to be the big TV and radio programs.

And [there’s a] democratization of information, but also the ability for people to succeed on the internet by creating content is constantly evolving. I think the trends are starting to accelerate a bit more. The latest election year showed a lot about what actually moved the needle for votes and everything else. You’re seeing this massive wave.

This year, we’ve seen tons of these journalists, whether it’s from The Washington Post or other traditional outlets, where these people have built up these personal brands, they have their beat, they know their audience really well, and they actually now have the tools and capabilities to go independent. I think that’s inspiring and fun and interesting, and ideally, we can be part of the toolkit to help empower them.

Although one of the interesting things about beehiiv is that you’re working with these individual creators, but you’re also working with larger publications like TechCrunch, and you’ve got even more legacy publications on the platforms as well. What is it like trying to build a platform that serves those different needs?

It’s a great question, and it’s actually why we led with this tagline during our event: the operating system of the content economy. Because I don’t want to be painted into just the creator economy. And we do serve TechCrunch and Time and Newsweek and all of these large publishers, and we serve them extremely well, just as we serve the long tail of content creators really well.

There has to be some commonality in that, and it’s just [that] content is what makes their business run, and that we think we can really be the operating system and help them succeed in doing that. My thesis from way back when I was at Morning Brew, and I was the second employee, I built all of their internal infrastructure and helped them scale. And when we were building Morning Brew, we had 3 million readers at a time, and all of these independent journalists and writers and smaller outlets came to us being like, “We want the same toolkit that you have.” All the way down to someone who’s writing [for] 10 people, their best friends and their mom and like that.

The initial thesis for beehiv was: Can we build enterprise level software like we built at Morning Brew, that any of these large publishers would want … but make it affordable for the long tail of everyone to have access to that? So that’s how we found ourselves in this weird spot of true enterprise-level software, where my brother launched a UFC newsletter last week with five people [reading] it, and there he’s using the same toolkit that Time is using, and TechCrunch.

It makes it more difficult on the product marketing side of things, PR is more difficult, how we talk about our users is difficult, because they are cohorted, but I still believe they all want the same thing. Ultimately, it’s a seamless experience to create content, but also [to] grow faster and make more money. And if we can do those three things and play nicely with the other tools in their tech stack, it’s usually the winning formula.

You mentioned your recent launch event, where my takeaway was that beehiiv is not just a newsletter company anymore — most notably, you now have this AI website builder. Was that always the direction you wanted to go in, or did that come later?

So no, I’d say most of the roadmap actually just comes from feedback from our users.