Ep 144: Beehiiv’s Creator Operating System with Tyler Denk

AdTechGod (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:43)

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AdTechGod (1:12)

Welcome to the AdTechGodPod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to another episode of the AdTechGodPod, where we speak to the founders of our industry. Normally, I speak with AdTech veterans, people who work in the space today. I actually have the co-founder of Beehiiv, Tyler Denk. Before launching Beehiiv, Tyler was a part of the early team at Morning Brew, where he saw firsthand how newsletters could grow into a meaningful media business. So he's doing that today with over 170,000 publications and reaching over 400 million people. So his reach is massive. If you're not familiar with Tyler Beehiiv, check it out. You will enjoy this interview. That's for sure. Tyler, thank you again for joining me on the pod today.

Tyler Denk (2:02)

Yeah, thanks for having me.

AdTechGod (2:03)

So I would consider myself a super user. I've been using Beehiiv for a couple of years, everything from segments to surveys to our main website. Everything is there. I personally really like the product, but before we kind of dig into some of the new products and features you've released, can you just take some of the audience back to your background, why you started Beehiiv, and I guess what got you to where you're at today?

Tyler Denk (2:27)

Yeah, for sure. To take a few steps back, I joined Morning Brew, as you mentioned in the intro, back in 2017 as the second employee. My job there was to run product engineering and growth. So I worked with the content team and the writers. We built our own content management system, so that's what they use to create the newsletter.

I worked with the ad sales team and the partnerships team to build this proprietary ad management platform, which managed all of the inventory of upcoming ad placements within the newsletter. It reported metrics back to the advertisers. It inserted the ads directly into the newsletter. So that was a well-oiled machine. I built the website, I ran the growth, I ran the marketing campaigns, built the dashboards, all in all, kind of built what I would consider the internal infrastructure of Morning Brew. And that led us to, when I joined, we had 100,000 readers, scaled it to 4 million readers up through the acquisition in 2020 from Business Insider. And on that journey, obviously learned so much working next to the content creators and writers and building tech for them. And then sitting next to on my other side, the sales team and building the tech for them to be able to monetize the different newsletter assets.

And through that, the beautiful thing about newsletters is you can reply to an email and get directly in contact with the person who wrote it. We would receive thousands of replies every day. And about a few hundred per day were actually people asking us, how did you build the newsletter? How does the design look that way? How are you scaling it so quickly? How did you build the referral program? What data are you looking at? And those emails would get forwarded to me from our intern team. And it became very obvious to me that what we had built was actually super valuable. And that whether they were writers at different businesses, whether they were hobbyists who wanted to launch a newsletter, there was this massive gap in the market for building best-in-class newsletters that could scale and monetize to the effect that Morning Brew had. And Morning Brew became kind of this beacon in this newsletter and media ecosystem of everyone wanted to build a newsletter that was Morning Brew for X, Morning Brew for Crypto, Morning Brew for AI, Morning Brew for Sports, Morning Brew for Politics. And that was really the impetus for Beehiiv. We built this tech internally. My users were the 30 employees at the company. But the input from everyone externally who wanted what we had built is what gave me the vision of there's clearly market demand here and what we had built was great.