How beehiiv Reached $10.2M ARR With an Email SaaS Platform and Ad Network

Guys, Tyler Denk launched beehiiv.com in 2020. Late twenty twenty, they start coding for ten months. They launched officially in 2021. They get going today, finished last year about a year ago, had about 4,000,000 in terms of run rate today at 10,200,000. They make their money off three interesting lines. Obviously, ad, premium, boost, but also their SaaS fee. That's the biggest one. They've got 20,000 active senders, meaning they sent at least one email in the past thirty

days. About 4,000 of those senders make money. On average, they make about 1,200,000 cumulative last month or about $300 per sort of sender. Obviously, there's power laws there. They have a total of a 150,000,000 unique subs. So certainly making great inroads not only on the SaaS model, but also the ad network and all the growth tools he's building really, democratizing what he built and, and grew at Morning Brew. Hey, folks. My guest today is Tyler Denk.

He cut his teeth up in Maryland at the University of Maryland as a research lead before finding a marketplace adventure storm and ultimately jumping into the world he's now known for as the growth engineer in 2017 at Morning Brew. He accelerated there in terms of product and growth and eventually senior product lead before building the business or helping build the business to millions of subscribers, $20,000,000 of revenue and a $75,000,000 exit before jumping then into Google

and now launching his full time focus beehiiv about in August 2021. We're gonna jump to the full story today. Tyler, are ready to take us to the top?

Yeah. That was a hell of a recap in thirty seconds. Great job.

I appreciate that. Out of curiosity, you know, Morning Brew is on a tear. You have this unique gene of being like marketer, but also you have an engineering gene in you. You write code. Why not stay at Morning Brew post acquisition?

Yeah. You said this was a short podcast, so very loaded question to get started with. But, yeah, Morning Brew is amazing. I had an opportunity to jump in as the second employee, and I think you nailed it. I have an engineering background, growth mindset, understand marketing, understand business, and that combination of understanding how all the pieces fit together and being able to build and code and understand how to build a polished product. That's kind of been

my sweet spot in my career. So I came into Morning Brew, amazing success story, learned a lot. The founders gave me a ton of room to run. But after three and a half years, I'd say that blank white page of things to build, it was already established. Had newsletter, we had the ecosystem, we had the growth. And I've always had a founder mentality where I just wanted more and ownership to be able to dictate what to

build. So I think it served its purpose. I obviously wouldn't be doing what I was do... What I'm doing today if it weren't for the Morning Brew experience, but was definitely ready to try something new.

Well, it's great. Obviously, you build a product to eat your own dog food. That by itself is a natural advantage getting into any new startup. You're now building beehiiv, which is effectively a marketplace between publishers and advertisers. Anything you'd add to that sort of one line overview?

Yeah. I actually say that would be, like, the second line of what we're doing. The first is we are a SaaS platform for publishers, content creators, businesses to send email. So anything from Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Substack, like, are kind of the competitors. If you are sending email to your audience or to your customers, we are first and foremost a SaaS platform to send emails. What you hit on is actually the second part, which is we are

building an ad network on top of the SaaS platform. So as someone who is sending newsletters to their audience, we have advertisers like Netflix, HubSpot, monday.com, Betterment that are looking to reach these niche audiences of newsletters, and we help connect them. So you can send a newsletter with the premium sponsor without having a sales team.

Tyler, you said last month on your website about 1,200,000 paid out to newsletters on beehiiv last month, which would have been, what is that, May... April, May May, of 2024 here. What what was that exactly a year ago, that same number?

Much smaller. So the ad network didn't really exist. The ad network was always something that we wanted to build, but you can't build an ad network with a few 100,000 impressions. We had to build a SaaS platform that was really good that attracted newsletters to move over, which brought more email sends impressions and then demand from advertisers. So the ad network a year ago today did not exist. We also have a post network, which is like

co registration being able to... You basically get paid for recommending other newsletters that also didn't exist a year ago. And then premium subscriptions has existed from the beginning. And that's what, when you can charge your audience directly $10 a month, dollars 100 a year, whatever you want to do there. We actually launched with that feature. So that's probably what you would see on the website a year ago in terms of the volume of revenue we were driving for our users.

And and I wanna get sort of the headlines today. I don't wanna bury the lead and then go back and get this sort of origin story of you building the tool. What is the number one metric sort of focused on? Say revenue is easy, but is it number of publishers, number of email sends, impressions, something else?

Yeah. Revenue is easy because it actually means you do so many other things. Right? Right? Like, if retention is important to you, but a decrease in revenue will show that you aren't retaining users, or if a decrease or slowing of revenue shows that you aren't attracting the right users to adopt the platform and converting them. So revenue really is the north star, but layers below that is volume of email because we are building an ad network.

We need billions and billions of impressions, high quality impressions. Unique publishers because we want different types of content being sent on the platform from business to politics, to sports, to home goods, whatever you want to write about. We want, like, a very diverse ecosystem of different content creators and publishers creating content on the platform. But it... Yeah. Again, it all ties down to revenue. Slowing revenue means we aren't converting or we're churning, and those are things that we're actively looking to prevent.

How many unique publishers are on the platform today, and how do you define unique?

Yeah. So unique publishers is the amount... We do active. So active publishers means that they have sent an email in the past thirty days. And so we have about 20,000 active publishers on the platform today. And then some publishers are part of, like, a collective of, like, what we call an org or, an account, essentially. Someone might have multiple different newsletters under a single account. So the account is a bit less than that, but active publishers is about 20,000.

Okay. And and does... So active publishers means they sent... Let's go down one more step down the funnel. Of the 20,000, how many of them made at least a dollar last month through the ad network?

It's a good question. So we have a metric around not just the ad network, but any of... So we have three monetization methods that I outlined. The ad network is one premium subscriptions are charging directly your audience a subscription fee, and then boost is the other. I believe right now we're at 20 to 25% of active users have monetized in the past thirty days. Our North Star is obviously going much higher than that, but it is

a very nascent ad marketplace as are the rest of our features. We're only two years old. So the fact that most SaaS platforms in the ecosystem are purely a cost. You pay them to send emails. They don't help you grow. They don't help you monetize. We help you grow with our growth suite. We help you monetize with the three ways that I just outlined. So the fact that 20 to 25% of our active users are earning

revenue through our platform, I think is an incredibly positive signal. Also, though our North Star metric really is how many of our users are earning more revenue than they are paying us. Right? Like, you might be paying us $99 a month, but you're earning $6,700 a month through the ad network alone, then we are value additive to your tech stack, which is very unique in the SaaS ecosystem where it's usually just an expense for your business.

Of those are there, Tyler? They make more than what their subscription fee is.

We're we're so... We we just hired a data data analyst, like, a few months ago, so we're but but that is what we're towards. If 25% are actively monetizing on a month to month basis, I don't know, probably half of that are net positive because we are very affordable. So probably, I'd say 10, 15% are net positive.

And how many of the 20,000 unique publishers, unique active publishers, how many subscribers they have in total?

Our active... So we're sending, what, 1,300,000,000 emails a month right now, and active readership's usually, I think, about 10 per... 10%. Probably, like, a 150 to 200,000,000 subs... Unique subscribers across the ecosystem. Yeah. I I was not... Just to give the audience a heads up, I was not briefed on any of these questions nor do I have any of these metrics, like, readily available or prepared. This is kind of right off the cuff.

No. No. We like right off the cuff. Otherwise, we get scripted answers. So so we appreciate you being transparent. But 20,000 unique active publishers, and then you take that down to 25% monetizing, that's 4,000. And then if you divide that into the 1,200,000 you paid out last month, I mean, these are folks on average making hundreds, right, $320 per month on average. But I guess true or false, Tyler, I imagine you probably have power laws in your user base. Right? You have some big newsletters that make the chunk of the revenue.

Yeah. There's definitely larger newsletters, more established, bigger brand name that brands want to work with. And that just by nature of size and reputation are getting more money, whether it's through premium subscriptions because they have a big name person behind them that can warrant charging $10.15, $20 a month for content or community, and then advertisers as well. But I actually think, yes, we have power users. The long tail is actually what's most interesting because previously a

lot of people saw a morning brew and Axios, a hustle having a lot of success. And it was so cost prohibitive and such a daunting task to have to scale an audience to be that large, to be able to monetize yourself. And what we've been able to solve with the long tail is the cold start problem where with Boost, you don't need a single subscriber. You can start monetizing day one. You can recommend five other newsletters

that are paying you $2 per lead. You might have 10 subscribers, which is your mom and your siblings. And every subscriber that comes in the door, can start monetizing $2 per recommendation. So you're net positive day one. And then the ad network as well, if you're a 500 person subscriber newsletter, Netflix was never looking at you previously to advertise. They didn't know that you existed. But with our marketplace, we can actually place high quality ads like

Netflix, HubSpot, Betterment into your newsletter and you're monetizing and again, cash flow positive month one. So I actually think the long tail is what's most exciting. Obviously volume and the big name players is what moves most of the volume of dollars and reputation. But the long... Definitely something we're excited about.

Switching away from the network for a second and just focusing on your growth tools, right, which is what I think most people wanna think about email marketing, they sort of think about the other tools that you use to send emails. You obviously charge a SaaS fee there. Do all 20,000 active senders also pay that SaaS fee or is it a subset of those 20,000?

So we have a free plan up to 25,000... 2,500 subscribers, which is fairly generous, one of the most generous in the industry. So you can get started and just not tap into all of our premium features, but send emails, have a website, use different growth tools and customization tools without paying as long as you're under 2,500 subscribers. But then you can upgrade at any size to access ad network boost, referral program, advanced website customization. So there's

kind of like a multiple tiered approach to the business model. It's both value based and whether you want premium features or not.

Mhmm. And how many folks do you have on the subscription sort of SaaS plan?

I don't have the number off the top of my head, but we're at about $859,100,000 MRR. Oh, great. That's our revenue currently. So you can kind of back into plans range from starting at $39 a month all the way up to $2.99, $3.99 before you hit enterprise.

Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that number and congrats on the big milestone past $10,000,000 of ARR that hopefully that that that got a big cheers in the office.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're totally remote, so virtual cheers.

Yes.

Yeah. We're gunning for 1,000,000 MRR. That... That's our goal for for as soon as possible, really.

Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and one... Went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with b to b software

founders. So far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling a $150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer. Alright. Let's jump into the interview. And just to be clear, you're you're not taking... There's not like a percent of ad spend that you're keeping. Right? That $8.50 is all from subscription SaaS.

So, yeah, there's... It's hard to communicate because I am pretty transparent with their numbers as you can tell. And so, like, I communicate it, but it gets lost in translation because there's a few different revenue streams. The SaaS business is purely... Has nothing to do with ads. That is people paying us a monthly or annual recurring subscription for the SaaS platform, and that's at 8 to 900,000 a month currently. The ad network itself is bringing in another several $100,000 in revenue. And then Monthly or annually? Monthly.

Oh, okay. Great.

Overall revenue as of, like, this recording is about 1.2 to 1,400,000 is where we'll end up this month. Mhmm. So... Yeah.

That... It's it's it's interesting because like a lot of... Like, I've interviewed so many entrepreneurs and sequencing is so important. Then what I mean by that is you you... There were companies before you're doing this marketplace model. I mean, I tried some of them like Paves. Right? But they just they just didn't deliver. Right? And they were only doing marketplace. They weren't doing this sort of full comprehensive scope that you're doing. I guess, how much would you credit your success? And you seem like a humble guy, so maybe you're not gonna take credit, but to your sequencing. What you did first, what you launched second, once you launched third, that... And how they all work together?

I would say that it's very intentional, right? Like I'm fully aware of Pave than the other marketplaces. One of Pave's competitors is Swapstack, and we actually acquired them last year. So like two sided marketplaces in any medium have kind of existed for a very long time where we benefit. And it's... Again, granted, it's much harder what we're doing. We are building a SaaS platform first that can stand alone as the best SaaS platform for sending emails

in the industry. Like, that comes before marketplace, before network, before monetization. That is just, we can build a better platform with better creator tools, helps you build a website and helps you scale your audience with the right data that's enjoyable to use. And so that is already a very difficult problem to do in a competitive space like email. Then later, once we have enough impressions... But this was always the goal from day one, you just don't

build it initially, was we we were always going to layer on an ad network on top, which is a totally separate problem set. And it is very difficult from where I stand to be able to optimize an ad network, but also make sure that the editor works perfectly well and the email automations go out perfect. Because, like, we are tackling two totally distinct problem sets on top of each other, and one doesn't work without the other.

So startups are kind of hard as is kind of doing two startups at once in some capacity has been difficult, but I think the payoff and the network effects, if we can nail it, are much greater.

Couple minutes left here. Some some questions just on growth since you're so transparent on the numbers, which we appreciate. If you're at 10,200,000 ARR today and that's just pure SaaS, right? If if you take... Go back a year ago today, what was revenue then?

Yeah. Great question. I don't have... What what is it? June right now?

No idea. Probably 300, probably in the $2.50 to 300 range, I'd say.

So call it 3,640,000 a month or a year or something like that run right... Run rate wise?

Yeah. I think last year, we did between 6 and 8,000,000 in revenue for the year. Mhmm. Mhmm.

That's great. And then, when did you write the first line of code for the platform? I know you guys... You just actually retweeted a video that says, hey. We coded for, you know, ten months and then finally posted a launch message. Was that the was that the was that what it was? Ten ten months pre revenue just building?

Yeah. So we raised our seed round in July or August 2021. Went full time right after that. So call it September 2021 is like when we went full time. November 2021 is when we launched publicly and accepting like new users who could sign up on their own. So November 2021 was the launch. If you back up ten months, me and my two co founders Ben and Jake started kind of roadmapping and building code probably November, December

2020. So ten, eleven months prior to going all in. Mhmm.

And what was the size of the seed round? How much did you raise there?

We raised 2.6. Mhmm. So enough pay ourselves, hire a CTO, pay him, hire a few additional engineers. And know, I'm I'm a big fan of, like, being able to bootstrap. I think people who can do that, incredible. And, like, definitely hats off to them. We had, like, big vendors we had to pay up front. We had to lock in annual commitments. We're all fairly young.

Like what? Like what? What was the biggest expense early on?

Like, for example, we are built on top of SendGrid, which is like an email engine to actually send and distribute the emails. And to get the attention that we needed from them, we needed like an annual contract with some sort of like volume lock in, which is like, I don't know, between 40 and $75,000 upfront for the year of which my two co founders were 24, I was 27. We're not sitting on a ton of money

to just be able to pay that. So I do think the timing of entrepreneurship is always fairly interesting where if we had a successful exit previously and had a bit more capital, could we have done this bootstrapped growing a little bit slower and been able to use existing capital rather than being ventured back? It's interesting. But I think it also is worth considering just how competitive of an industry it is and something to be said about not having to overanalyze every expense while we're trying to win market share.

Mhmm. I mean, you were employee number two at Morning Brew, just not enough equity to see meaningful cash distribution when they were acquired for $75,000,000?

Enough to have a nice car and apartment and, like, a decent life, but not enough to be able to fund a hill... A whole second and, like, purchase and be able to pay, a CTO and everything else. So there's a difference, early... But I'd say the takeaway from that was there's a big difference between early employee money and and founder money.

Fair enough. Fair enough. And the seed rounds, you know, 2021, most folks were selling, call it 15, 20% of the company. Were you sort of in that same range?

No. We were closer to 10%.

Oh, 10. Okay. Got it. And then, you've raised more since then. When was the last round?

Yeah. So we did... I can give you a whole funding background. 2,600,000 in the fall, of twenty twenty one. We did another 1.6, just like a seed extension in, I'd say May 2022, kind of like a, Hey, we have product market fit. We need a few more hires. That was supposed to be it. I don't think that we're never gonna raise again, but I've been wrong three times. We raised a 12,500,000 series A in the summer

of twenty twenty three. And then we just raised a $33,000,000 series B led by NEA in March 2024.

So people say right now it's crazy time to raise that equity. Were you able to get it to a valuation you liked obviously in the series B?

Yeah. So the valuation's actually public. So it's... It was $2.25. So Mhmm. Less about valuation, more about ownership, having enough capital to build the business. But... Yeah. We did we did

Ownership drives... Is driven by... Mean, that's what... That's 15% dilution. Right? So so you you can care about ownership, but obviously, when you're doing the capital raise, you gotta make sure you you put yourself in a position to not lose control of the business. Right?

Yeah. I think when ownership's probably overset in terms of, like, the different layers of ownership, there's ownership of, like, raw percentage of the business that you have outstanding. And then also, like, who controls the board, who has, like, the rights to be able to make the core decisions of which we are in control of the business. So

That's great. That's great. Anything before we wrap up? Anything you want the audience to know that we haven't chatted about already?

No. I'm super impressed with how quickly you're able to run through everything in fifteen. That was great.

Hey, Cody. We gotta get back to the gym. You know how it is, man. So let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, your favorite business book.

Favorite business book. Honestly, it may not be a business book, but thinking fast and slow is more of, like, a psychology book, and I think applicable to business than everything else.

Yeah. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

No. But I really admire Brian Chesky.

Mhmm. Number three, besides SendGrid, which online tool do you pay the most money for?

Probably something boring like AWS, Heroku, just like infrastructure, ClickHouse, something like that.

Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night, Tyler?

I prioritize sleep between seven and eight.

That's great. Yeah. Great. You you said earlier, I hope you mind... Don't mind me sharing this because on a rest day, which is the third Friday of the month, which is awesome. Nice balance.

Yeah. We do... I picked that up from when I was at Google during COVID. They did, like, one every, like, few months, but we have a monthly wellness day. The third Friday of every month is a day off, so three day weekend. So, yeah, that is today.

Eight hours of sleep. And how old are you today?

30.

30 years old. End situation, married, single, kiddos?

Single, no kiddos. Well, I have a girlfriend, but I guess I got... As a tax filing, that's single.

Yeah. Fair enough. I love that that's your default. It's like according to the government, my tax filing.

I just bought the accountants and everything else. So, like, I'm not used to saying, like, I'm in the mind of being single. But... Yes.

Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. Last question. Something you wish you knew back when you were 20.

It's a great question.

I actually wouldn't even say something that I would change or or something that I learned, but I I would actually double down on moving to a big city and getting to meet people. Now I live in Los Angeles. I stay in my room and work all day. But being in New York in my early twenties, being able to meet people at work, networking, happy hours, everything else, I've met such an incredible group of people that has

helped propel my career forward. So remote is amazing. I'm the biggest advocate of remote work, but I think if you can get to a city and even make the time to network yourself, you probably wouldn't regret that.

Guys, Tyler Denk launched beehiiv.com in 2020. Late twenty twenty, they start coding for ten months. They launched officially in 2021. They get going today. Finished last year about a year ago, had about 4,000,000 in terms of run rate today at 10,200,000. They make their money off three interesting lines. Obviously, ad, premium, boost, but also their SaaS fee. That's the biggest one. They've got 20,000 active senders, meaning they sent at least one email in the past thirty

days. About 4,000 of those senders make money. On average, they make about 1,200,000 cumulative last month or about $300 per sort of sender. Obviously, there's power laws there. They have a total of a 150,000,000 unique subs. So certainly making great inroads not only on the SaaS model, but also the ad network and all the growth tools he's building really, democratizing what he built and, and grew at Morning Brew. So, Tyler, appreciate you, man. Thanks for taking us to the top.

Yo. Thanks for having me.