How Tyler Denk Grew beehiiv to a $250M Business in 3.5 Years

**Tyler Denk** (0:00)
If you would have told me back when I had 49 cents in my bank account, 120k in debt, that in two years, I could have like $7 million in my bank account for something that we had built and like that I'm proud of. Pretty amazing upside. I was working very hard, but nothing that paid me. I had 49 cents in my bank account, would have said yes to literally anything. The default action in life is inaction. I remember just going down to Manhattan Beach and sitting on the pier. It's like one of the saddest I've ever been. I was like, I'm so close to like this dream that I wanted. In the most embarrassing way possible, got like rejected after an hour of this day long interview. I was just sitting on the pier by myself, pretty fucking humbling.

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:34)
You basically rejected a huge acquisition offer.

**Tyler Denk** (0:37)
We said, fuck that to the 30 million.

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:40)
You've just graduated college, you've got 100k in debt, you've got a couple of life choices ahead of you. I want to talk about that period in time and specifically a phone call you got from Austin.

**Tyler Denk** (0:50)
Yeah, so 120k in debt for those counting at home. I grew up very middle to low class and basically took out all of my university through college and student loans. So, and then typically when people do that, they work very hard during college and they kind of repay the loan. I was working very hard, but nothing that paid me. I started a company in college while an undergrad, my sophomore year, and basically tried building this company through sophomore, junior, senior year, and it didn't pay the bills because we were an unprofitable startup trying to figure out monetization. So I basically forwent any sort of income for three years while taking out like $25,000 student loans every year. And that sounds OK if the company is going to be the next billion dollar company or even just be able to pay the bills.

**Wouter Teunissen** (1:38)
Just something.

**Tyler Denk** (1:39)
Unfortunately, it didn't. And so fast forward to graduation, I don't have a source of income. I moved back home to my parents' house. I'm living in my basement. And there's a clock of like six months after you graduate before your student loan payments start being due, where I have to start like paying.

**Wouter Teunissen** (1:56)
Is it that quick?

**Tyler Denk** (1:57)
It's like, yeah, it's like six months. I have to pay $800 a month or so in student debt. So that's like the time clock I'm working with. I think I tinker around with my two co-founders for like two more months. And I'm like, look, different place. I just can't do this. I have to figure out what's next and start like actually bringing in income. So I gave up my dream. The dream at the time was like building this company, gave that up and began just like freelancing and building different websites. I was building. I love Shopify. Shopify was something I found in 2016 I mean, it's been around before then, but I discovered in 2016 and thought it was like so incredible that all of these offline stores can build beautiful online websites, so I built a Shopify store for my grandfather's shoe store downtown in Baltimore. They're like a physical location, and I was like, look, you sell amazing shoes. We can do this online. We can sell the Baltimore, Maryland, or honestly anywhere in the country, and I'll build this website for you. They paid me $1,000 for that, which was amazing. I think it was underutilized on their end, but that was the type of work I was doing. I was just looking for anything that I could build as a self-taught software developer to bring in any sort of income.
And then I caught up one day with...

**Wouter Teunissen** (3:08)
Is that why Shopify was so attractive to you? Because you could just go in at yourself and it was like permissionless to start creating websites or...?

**Tyler Denk** (3:15)
Yeah, I mean Shopify is amazing. I think the stock price and success has spoken for itself. But the fact that the paradigm before that was sinking up your own payment portal, having to accept credit cards, having to manage shipping and inventory, and even just building a website that people wanted to go and visit, was a huge step forward from what was possible before Shopify. And again, lowering the barriers of entry and combining multiple facets of what it means to sell a product online in a single platform, without having to need to know how to code. I was doing custom sites and tweaking things, but you can have no technical background and build a beautiful Shopify site and sell thousands of dollars of merch that day. So it was definitely very attractive. If I had any more than $0 in my bank account, I would have invested everything in a Shopify back then. I have texted my phone telling all my friends to invest. And it was like in the stage when we first graduated from college, most people had a bit more income than I did, but we had a little bit of capital, like to play around with like Robin Hood and invest in things. And I was like, yo, Shopify is like my bet. Would be wealthier if I had any, some of them did, but I mean, I'd be a lot wealthier if I had any bit of money to put into that bet. Maybe it was like hard, it was less believable to follow my lead when I'm like, this is what I would do. But I'm the brokeest out of all of us.