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Tyler Denk: The Secret to Building a Billion Dollar Startup l Trailblazers Podcast Episode 58 · Trailblazers by Erica Wenger

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Today on the show, I am so excited to be joined by Tyler Dink, Tyler is the co-founder and CEO of BeHeif.
0:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The publishing platform that helps creators, publishers, and brands build grow and monetize their audiences, and own them outright, rather than renting them from someone else's algorithm.
0:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Launching in 2021, Beehive has grown at a staggering clip, now empowering more than 170,000 publications, reaching over 450 million readers.
0:23
[SPEAKER_00]: His path there runs straight through the newsletter Gold Rush.
0:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Tyler was a second employee at Morning Brew, where he led product, engineering, and growth and wrote much of the early code that scaled the company to millions of subscribers.
0:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He later served as a product lead at Google on YouTube Music, building Beehive on nights and weekends before going all in.
0:38
[SPEAKER_00]: More recently, he was named to Adweeks 2026 AI Power 50 for his work at the intersection of AI advertising and publishing.
0:44
[SPEAKER_00]: That's welcome Tyler.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a great introduction.
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: What's left to talk about?
0:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I know, right?
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: My job were done.
0:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Wait, so I saw this billion number, which I want I like hinted at.
0:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell everyone what that number is in terms of emails you have sent?
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, a total I'm not sure, but per month we're sending about 5 billion emails every single month.
1:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is funny because when we first started it was me my two co-founders We had we're tiny right like no users.
1:08
[SPEAKER_01]: No revenue But I knew that we were gonna use send grid zone by Twilio and we needed like an account manager They wouldn't give us an account manager because we weren't paying them yet And I told them when that first call that I could finally get their attention I was like we're gonna be one of your biggest users and they totally laughed me out of the room Which was like very motivating and then now that we're sending over 5 billion emails a month I'd say we're definitely in the top 5% if not 1% of their users
1:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of these days, you have to text or email the person that was on that first call and be like, told you.
1:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Why not be there anymore who knows?
1:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always in like eight.
1:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, at that point, they're post acquisition, like I think they're just kind of hosting.
1:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They're doing well.
1:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't need to worry about that.
1:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm excited to get into it.
1:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm excited to talk about the early days.
1:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we get into the meat of the interview, we start with an icebreaker.
1:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
1:51
[SPEAKER_00]: This is going to be a harder question.
1:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to give you a softball to start.
1:54
[SPEAKER_00]: When you think about your journey, it can be five years of building behind or even before that.
1:58
[SPEAKER_00]: What has been the hardest part of your journey so far that almost broke you?
2:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm very primed for this, based on the interview I had earlier, but I think some people know you're familiar with the story, our CTO and co-founder passed away about six months after we launched the company, so that not only quite really broke me, it almost broke the company.
2:18
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the most important person at the company, he was so brilliant.
2:21
[SPEAKER_01]: It was right when we hit like product market fit, we were probably doing $10,000 a month in revenue, we just hit scaling issues for the first time,
2:29
[SPEAKER_01]: and he was fixing all of our scaling issues and then he tragically passed away.
2:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And so going through that experience, I think has like hardened me as a founder and definitely hardened the team where in contrast the other problems that we deal with with like a day-to-day basis today feel very small relative to going through a co-founder passing away.
2:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I had a feeling you were going to say that.
2:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I mean, I remember what it happened and how like mind blowing that was.
2:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell everyone a little bit about what happened?
2:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what, you know, you say it was tragic, but tell everyone a little bit more about the story of impassing away.
3:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so my least favorite thing to talk about but we can dig into it.
3:07
[SPEAKER_01]: We I met Andrew Plackin.
3:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I was previously at Morning Brew.
3:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure we'll get into the Morning Brew story as well Yeah, but I am a self taught software programmer software developer.
3:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I taught myself how to code in college.
3:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I built my first startup in college
3:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Somehow convinced Austin Reef at Morning Brew to give me a job running product and engineering at Morning Brew.
3:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And after a few years of like calling the shots at Morning Brew and as they were legitimizing, I think Austin is very smart and sophisticated and he goes, we have a self-taught 25 year old leading our product and engineering org.
3:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So he rightfully, I unbeknownst to me, like reach out to his investors, and it was like, hey, is there any engineers like technical guidance we can give Tyler?
3:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we like him, he just is kind of figuring it out on the fly, and I think at the point of doing $10,15 million in revenue, we should probably legitimize that.
3:56
[SPEAKER_01]: So he tapped his investors, one of his investors was best friend with this guy named Andrew Piacan, and so Andrew became my like unofficial technical advisor, which really meant whenever I had no idea what to do or broke something, which was like very frequent, I would call Andrew, and somehow I knew he was special because within like 10 minutes, he was not in the room with us, he's not building anything with us, but he was able to identify a problem, fix it, save my ass, like many, many times.
4:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, fast forward, I am building behind Nights and we can with my two co-founders.
4:28
[SPEAKER_01]: We are moving a little bit slower than I would like to be doing, and this is before we launch.
4:32
[SPEAKER_01]: This is when we all have full time jobs.
4:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And at one point I just got frustrated with how the pace of development that I reached out to Andrew and asked if he wanted to join us.
4:42
[SPEAKER_01]: He was going to become a CTO of another company that fell through and ultimately like I convinced him to join us as like a co-founder and CTO and so that was probably the summer of 2021.
4:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the rest is like kind of history.
4:56
[SPEAKER_01]: We launched in November.
4:57
[SPEAKER_01]: We grew $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 month after month.
5:01
[SPEAKER_01]: We finally had this product market fit in momentum, which is so hard, right?
5:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Like nine out of 10 startups fail.
5:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt like we were defined the odds and had this very clear trajectory.
5:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And then one day on a Friday he messaged us that he wasn't feeling well, was gonna lay down and we never heard from him again.
5:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's extremely horrifying.
5:22
[SPEAKER_00]: As things are just starting to work, like the one person that is helping you make it happen and the one person who believed in you isn't there to watch it happen.
5:31
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you guys think about his legacy now?
5:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I, again, I can only imagine how horrifying that all was, your five years later, how does that motivate you?
5:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And like how do you talk about it internally, living, Andrews Legacy out as a company?
5:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally well, I think our DNA of a company as in shipping very fast, like the velocity, the care of which we do everything.
5:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Very much like that was his ethos.
5:56
[SPEAKER_01]: The reason why we call them such like an animal and like a unicorn engineer was he was able to ship so much code so quickly, but also so empathetic and like unblock every other engineer on the team.
6:08
[SPEAKER_01]: He was like someone who made every other engineer on the team like 10 times better.
6:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think when you ask people in the start of ecosystem, like what do you think of beehive?
6:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Typically, it's product velocity, very rapid feature development, very customer obsessed.
6:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of that DNA lives with that early foundation that we had with him as a CTO.
6:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And then also quite literally he and his family is like a part of the company when he passed away.
6:35
[SPEAKER_01]: He hadn't actually vested so I can start up best thing.
6:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Like your first year is your cliff period.
6:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you leave the company before you are you typically don't get any equity.
6:45
[SPEAKER_01]: He passed away I think like eight months into that but we accelerated it and then gifted it to his mother.
6:54
[SPEAKER_00]: you have to tell me more about that.
6:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So Andrew passes away.
6:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, that's a horrifying time.
7:00
[SPEAKER_00]: How did that conversation come about?
7:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And how did you give it to her?
7:03
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened there?
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I got connected to Stacey through our, well, his best friend and the investor who had, I think he also invested in us as well.
7:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I got connected to the family.
7:14
[SPEAKER_01]: She was so overwhelmingly positive and nice.
7:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I've said I never met RCTO as mother before.
7:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And
7:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I got connected with her.
7:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I went to the funeral.
7:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I just became very obvious to me that we would not be where we were at that point if it wasn't for Andrew.
7:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And the technicality of the contract of not being able to give the equity until like a year has passed.
7:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Just felt very wrong.
7:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Like for me to take his few percentage points back in distributed to like myself or someone else like felt very wrong.
7:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as soon as I got connected to Stacey, I figured that was the obvious thing to do.
7:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And did you guys have a conversation about it?
7:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Or did you wait a little bit?
7:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I would imagine she's obviously very focused on the work of dealing with her son.
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you guys have a ceremony?
8:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, do you guys keep in touch?
8:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to hear more about that.
8:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, me and Stacey have a great relationship.
8:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I love Stacey.
8:04
[SPEAKER_01]: She's the most friendly person and loving person.
8:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so, yeah, I don't remember that entire period is very, I feel like I browned out through that entire experience, like the exact form of operations of, like, when I went to the funeral when we told her we're gifting her shares, but she's been very instrumental and supportive in the sense that,
8:25
[SPEAKER_01]: As you know, when you raise additional rounds, like new investors come in, and typically investors are very bullish.
8:31
[SPEAKER_01]: They want as many shares they can possibly get, and they try to clear the cap table like any past investors who want to cash out.
8:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we had our series A, our new investors came in, light speed, like very supportive, like Hazard, any one on the cap table that would want to sell.
8:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we kind of make our rounds just like you know that the new people on the captive we want to support them and if there's people who want to get liquidity that invested early like we should give them that opportunity.
8:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So I asked Stacey if she wanted to sell her shares which is like it's a great markup from where she was like you know gifted as like a co-founding shares and she said no during the A and then also said no during the B.
9:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So she's locked in with us.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Stacey's along for the ride for sure.
9:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Stacey's sending it.
9:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, especially with the B, right, like she lives in Memphis, I think she would do very well and very much be able to afford a neighborhood in Memphis with the cash that I think NEA would be willing to pay her to buy out her shares, but she feels a emotional connection to the company and wants to stick with it.
9:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So, one thing I've learned at talking to GPs on the show, and in my own experience as a GP, is that your back office is a signal.
9:33
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9:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The more buttoned up you are, the more likely they are to give you more money in the future.
9:42
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9:44
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9:52
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9:56
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10:00
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10:03
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10:05
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10:08
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10:11
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10:15
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10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's, it's her son's legacy, you know, and I think you guys are living proof of that, you know, I think you undersell even this product velocity thing that he helped create as someone who just sort of like cheers from the sidelines, it's unbelievable what you guys have enabled to accomplish and I know Andrew would be so proud of you.
10:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk about product velocity and how you actually tangibly make that happen in a company.
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you said he was so good on blocking people and he was like so clear that those were his values.
10:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's really hard to ship as fast as you guys ship.
10:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So what were the things that Andrew did and maybe even that your team does now that makes you be able to ship as fast as you do?
10:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think there's a few things there.
10:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I think one, it was me, my two co-founders, Andrew, the first four people at the company were all engineers.
11:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think even from the earliest days, it was very clear that we're like an engineering first company, not a sales lead or not like a growth lead or like we wanted to win based on the best product and that became clear of like who we hired at the beginning.
11:17
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of other things.
11:18
[SPEAKER_01]: All of our engineers are full stack, probably to this day.
11:24
[SPEAKER_01]: and to break that down like there's typically one more mature teams there's a front end team which is doing like the front end design and like the user interface and then there's the back end team which is doing like kind of how everything's working behind a scene and a lot of mature orgs have a designer they hand off the mockups the front end team builds it the back end team does the back end they all have to coordinate there's like a lot of
11:44
[SPEAKER_01]: nodes in the system working together and a lot of collaboration.
11:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me just listen to a podcast yesterday where this product manager had a product was talking about how collaboration is actually terrible for a lot of.
11:54
[SPEAKER_01]: A collaboration is always put in a positive light, but it really just means you're moving as fast as the slowest or weakest person in that node.
12:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And the more interchanging and
12:03
[SPEAKER_01]: whatever you have to do in these stages, I could just slow things down, having very talented full stack engineers means that they can do everything that I just said.
12:11
[SPEAKER_01]: My co-founders are gifted with design and product, so they don't need like a product manager telling them what to do.
12:16
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't need design, they have an incredible sense of design.
12:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And they, I can say, hey, we need to build a referral program.
12:22
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to build automations.
12:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And there doesn't need to be much more discussion.
12:25
[SPEAKER_01]: They can figure out what that means.
12:27
[SPEAKER_01]: They're able to ideate, they can come up with the designs, they build it themselves, they QA it themselves.
12:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we just took something that typically takes five or six people on a team and now like one person's in charge of it.
12:38
[SPEAKER_01]: The flip side is like I'm incredibly gifted to have amazing talented, incredibly fortunate to have gifted and talented co-founders and a lot of the early engineers we hired.
12:49
[SPEAKER_01]: had that same caliber of autonomy and ownership and product in design sense.
12:54
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's like the real shortcut.
12:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Like when it seems like we were launching a new feature every week, it's because we have eight different engineers building eight different features that all just so happened to launch like this week, then the next week, then the next week.
13:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So it gives the illusion but really it's a one-person team behind most of those features.
13:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It was up until very recently that now, just for sustainability like the bus factor, like if someone were to get hit by a bus, like now we try to have like two plus engineers on any given feature, just so if one goes on vacation, we can continue to work on that.
13:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'd say for the first two years, it was one very talented engineer per feature.
13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, of course, the obvious question becomes, like, I think that's a lot of startup stream scenario to have, like, the unicorn engineer that can do everything, but you have to hire them and convince them to join you.
13:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So, my question is two parts, like, one, how are you finding these, like, incredible full stack engineers that want to work on this mission, that want to work with you, that want to take the start of bed, and how you convince them to join you.
13:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I always say that I think the most important seal is a founder's storytelling.
13:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I have to convince Andrew that his well-paying start-up job that he's been out for three years was a worse option than joining three guys with no product, no users, no revenue, and give him a path forward to get excited about that he can get on the ground floor and build something.
14:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to convince our first five engineers to leave, well-paying jobs, getting paid 200k sustainable, like benefits, health insurance, whatever, to take a risk on a company that was making $10,000.
14:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, we were making as much money as they were making per month, um, and it is just storytelling.
14:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, and I don't mean storytelling as, like, lying.
14:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, it's, it's,
14:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's a vision that I have of what this company can be.
14:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I think yes, right now, we send a few emails, barely, and our products not back ahead.
14:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you look at the trajectory and you look at both what we are able to accomplish and the trajectory of the creator, economy, and media, and what we can do after we launch these features, I think this could change the entire industry.
14:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you come now, obviously, the upside is like one, the equity, and obviously,
14:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I sit from a position where, hopefully, we were there in the black and everyone who took over risk on me will see some great return one day.
15:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, you, and I posted about this recently of a lot of startups.
15:10
[SPEAKER_01]: You see the headlines of this company just got acquired for $10 billion, but what you did in those during peak 2021, they were valued at $20 billion and they were actually sold at a loss.
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, not every employee makes out in those situations.
15:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a long way of saying like storytelling is so important and I think one of my superpowers as a founder has been
15:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Over communicating, especially as a remote company, there should be zero ambiguity as to what everyone's doing, but more importantly, what every single person's role is and the broader mission of the company, I want customer support number seven.
15:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Just use the number seven, to know that exactly what they're doing in a day-to-day basis rolls up into this goal, which rolls up into this goal, which rolls up into the big mission that we're trying to build.
15:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And whether it's customer support or product or design, like everyone should know when they go to work in the morning,
16:00
[SPEAKER_01]: that what they're doing has an impact on the overall business.
16:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's my job to tell that story and make it clear.
16:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, you're describing the CEO job.
16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people think it's like doing all the work and being in the weeds.
16:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's parts of that, but it's really like vision.
16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I know where we're going, come along with me.
16:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
16:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll go.
16:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I do love the in the weeds.
16:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that's like, yeah, that's actually where I feel the most fertile.
16:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's where I feel the most friction is the founder is like as we're 130 people now.
16:23
[SPEAKER_01]: and here i'm doing an interview here like i'm not at my desk working like where i feel most productive is actually headphones in heads down just building things whether it's product design uh strategy gross strategy like anything i like to get shit done i like having a checklist of here's the ten things i want to do and actually doing it as we've scaled the job changes and like it becomes more management more shaking hands more doing events and in panels and whatnot
16:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is like a personal friction that I always feel because I think there's the accepted path of what it means to be a CEO of like a growing series B series C company and I think there's what gives me energy and passion on day to day basis and I think at least I've been outspoken and disciplined of I realizing when we're going down the wrong path where I don't there's a time when I had 18 direct reports and
17:09
[SPEAKER_01]: and I was in so many meetings and I didn't look forward to waking up and going to work because it was just sitting in meetings and that's not what gives me energy and I think a lot of founders fall into the trap of like oh that's just what it is when you're at 100 some employees like that's just the job and I pushed back and I was like that's just not the job that I want and so I got rid of half my direct reports we do meet it we do one-hones once a month we don't do meetings Tuesdays and Thursdays and I have carved out a lot of time and space for me
17:40
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18:31
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18:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to be a compulsive note taker.
18:35
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18:42
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18:45
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18:49
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18:56
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19:03
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19:10
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19:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I use granola for several things.
19:14
[SPEAKER_00]: If I finish a meeting with a potential investor in my fund, I'll ask granola what I could have done better to get my point across.
19:20
[SPEAKER_00]: If I'm meeting with a founder I like, I'll ask granola to point out any major green flags or red flags I may not have already caught.
19:26
[SPEAKER_00]: For people with a lot of meetings and decisions that require endless context, Granola is a game changer.
19:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, we're running Granola on today's episode.
19:34
[SPEAKER_00]: You can read the full show notes at Granola.ai-slash trailblazers and you can see it linked below here.
19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: New users get three months completely free.
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: That's Granola.ai-slash trailblazers.
19:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's the beauty of running your own shop is like you can decide what you want to do.
19:47
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you can decide how you spent your time.
19:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that's really awesome.
19:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think actually you've done a good job of sharing sort of the your unconventional leadership principles, which hopefully will inspire other people.
19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of storytelling, I want to talk a little bit about like newsletter term.
20:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Because like obviously your business, you know, I'd love to hear like the one liner you guys say now.
20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's really rooted in like newsletter creation and distribution.
20:08
[SPEAKER_00]: You have all these exciting product lines.
20:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But initially that felt like a small business.
20:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure you heard that all the time when you went out to raise to start.
20:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But your job as a storyteller was to share the potential.
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what's your advice for founders that may feel like they're building in a more niche market?
20:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But they know it could be huge.
20:24
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you storytell your way out of that?
20:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, literally yesterday in the gym I was listening to a podcast with the What Not Founder.
20:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Where I'm blanking on the actual like type of guy.
20:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it Sam?
20:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Parse podcast is great?
20:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
20:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And I forgot the name of the dials, the dolls that they were selling at the beginning.
20:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh yeah, the, um, oh my god, what do they call it?
20:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I've never heard of them before.
20:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Really?
20:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I've heard of them.
20:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able
21:00
[SPEAKER_01]: relatable to a lot of investors like even this year in that space like why would you care about buying and selling those types of dolls and he brought up a great point he's like all of the best businesses that you've seen like have always started very niche like Uber was black cars only right and now Uber's like like
21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: It's synonymous with transportation in cities.
21:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And for us, yeah, it was newsletter.
21:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It was I previously helped build morning where we have a huge success story out of taking morning through from 100,000 readers to 5 million readers and getting acquired for $75 million.
21:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know that space inside and out.
21:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think back then I would have thought that we would have such an expansive platform as we do today.
21:40
[SPEAKER_01]: That kind of wasn't the plan.
21:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I think for the first two years it was let's build the best newsletter product and I know the roadmap at Morning Brew because we built it and let's just replicate that and I think that's a bigger market than most people give us credit for.
21:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But as the creator economy has kind of evolved, all of the most successful creators aren't just single channel, they're not just podcasts, they're not just TikTok, they're typically newsletter and podcasts and YouTube and they have some sort of community or storefront or something that they're selling.
22:07
[SPEAKER_01]: and as we've been able to lean into customer feedback and just like what the macro conditions kind of show like that's what creators want.
22:14
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't want to be isolated just in a YouTube channel not have any way to getting contact with their subscribers on YouTube to sell them things.
22:22
[SPEAKER_01]: They want to be able to own their audience own their distribution and also do it in a way where
22:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Does not it company or brand that's like intermediating between them?
22:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I think the Creator economy has become synonymous with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.
22:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You get those subsack in there.
22:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are all channels of like distribution.
22:41
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you have 100,000 subscribers on YouTube,
22:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have an event next week, like you can post a video about your event.
22:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way the algorithm works may be 5,000 of those 100,000 actually see it.
22:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I personally much rather send a newsletter to 100,000 people, knowing 100,000 people are going to receive that newsletter.
22:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not saying newsletters are better than video, but I think they're all a piece of a pie of like what it means to be a complete creator or media company today.
23:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hope to be the infrastructure to support all of that.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
23:10
[SPEAKER_00]: What is your take on email versus phone numbers?
23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I think, you know, we all are getting bombarded now with emails.
23:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there was a huge SMS wave.
23:19
[SPEAKER_00]: What was it like six to eight years ago with like community.com and attentive and emotive and post script.
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking of names I haven't heard of in a while.
23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: But like SMS was big for a while.
23:30
[SPEAKER_00]: email's been big.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: What is next?
23:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you guys think about text?
23:33
[SPEAKER_00]: You think about the next wave of email because we all are getting so much sent to us?
23:38
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you think about waiting through the noise?
23:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think there's clearly an abundance of content today in podcast and newsletter in even in video right like one just UGCA both on like Instagram and TikTok but also like Netflix is cranking out series left and right like there's just so much optionality and abundance in the media ecosystem.
23:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I think one again, I love quoting that like the internet is so much bigger than anyone gives it credit for like
24:04
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a newsletter on our platform for working magicians that has 10,000 readers, so 10,000 magicians around the world, and he's making six figures from this newsletter.
24:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, he didn't need to go mass market and be the next morning brew.
24:17
[SPEAKER_01]: He found a very particular niche that he's passionate about as built a business based on his passions and expertise.
24:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And now has a six figure income stream just from what I can say.
24:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And he only needed 10,000 magicians to sign up to this thing, right?
24:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So like,
24:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I say all of that because I don't think you need mascal anymore like you don't need to be the next morning But you don't need millions and millions of subscribers I think you can have a passion and a particular niche and carve out that niche.
24:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's more ways to
24:45
[SPEAKER_01]: monetize audiences than ever before.
24:47
[SPEAKER_01]: My personal newsletter, like, I have 150,000 readers.
24:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I monetize with ads like a lot of newsletter still.
24:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I also host a founder mastermind in Costa Rica where I make more money from hosting one founder mastermind.
24:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I host eight founders that paid $10,000 each.
25:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Then, like, 15 newsletters.
25:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, like, whether it's courses or digital products or IRL events, like there's so many different ways to monetize your audience.
25:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I don't know,
25:14
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't a abundance of media options, makes me proud.
25:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So I feel like that wasn't the case like 10 years ago.
25:21
[SPEAKER_01]: When I started at Morning Brew, we hosted our content on WordPress.
25:25
[SPEAKER_01]: We copied and pasted our news letter into Mailchimp.
25:28
[SPEAKER_01]: If you wanted to do paid subscriptions, you had to use Stripe and Member Full.
25:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a full-time engineer's job to make just the pieces fit together.
25:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was such a bird in that most people never even started to have find a voice online and create a news letter about whatever they're passionate about.
25:43
[SPEAKER_01]: but because I'd like to think behind play the small part in democratizing access or making it so easy with $0.00 credit card, you can have website newsletter, podcast, community, storefront, and be able to put your ideas out on the internet.
25:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's super empowering and the abundance, I think is the outcome of a lot of the work that we've done.
26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
26:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I also think with so powerful about newsletters to you what you were saying earlier is it's not just about the ads from the newsletters, but it's all the other things that you can monetize because you have their emails.
26:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's the thing that people miss a lot.
26:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there like, oh, well, you only have 100,000 subscribers.
26:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know, like, is, you know, company really gonna pay for that, but actually they're all people who are excited about you.
26:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can then, you know, like you said, do a founder mastermind or do a course or do something that's going to be an infinitely higher ticket than just like opening up a newsletter.
26:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you're fun, right?
26:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I think is very, very dependent on email.
26:36
[SPEAKER_00]: 100% it's everything.
26:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And like so much though, that we actually had a viral bee hive post lead to us creating the fund.
26:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, that's the craziest part of it, too.
26:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, something might go viral and then you get inbound for something whether it's investment or it's founders who want to give you money or whatever, they'd like wait a sec.
26:50
[SPEAKER_00]: This could be something bigger than I even thought.
26:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So I completely agree with you.
26:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk to you a little bit about AI and agents, obviously we have to.
26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I will tell you what I do now and then you can tell me your thoughts.
27:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I subscribe to newsletters from people that I think are really smart.
27:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of them use B-hive, the smart ones use B-hive, and I use a lot of my agents to summarize.
27:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Read through whether it's like reading through articles online or reading through newsletters and give me like the bullet points that are relevant based on maybe it's previous conversations I've had with my agents, maybe it's what I've stated as my goals are in my big, you know, 2026 strategy doc.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I am not always reading the newsletter myself, my agent is.
27:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a very interesting change.
27:33
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some I still read, some that are very human-read, do they're like, you know, my friends.
27:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But I have my agents reading a lot of my new slutters.
27:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that going to change?
27:42
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you think about that?
27:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And how do you think about building behalf for an agent-led world versus a human-led world?
27:48
[SPEAKER_01]: very loaded question, but I think it's really interesting.
27:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure you was talking about this a lot.
27:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to get just like a snapshot into the internal strategy talks, as we have.
27:56
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29:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So quick experiment, think about the last long message you typed.
29:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The slack thread, a promptant to claw, a detailed email, it probably took you 10 minutes, maybe even 20, to get it just right.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Now imagine you just set it out loud instead.
29:14
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the whole pitch for whisper flow.
29:16
[SPEAKER_00]: whisper flow is a voice to text that actually works in every app on every device.
29:20
[SPEAKER_00]: You speak naturally and it outputs clean, formatted text that's ready to send.
29:24
[SPEAKER_00]: No setup, no integrations, no fixing, your transcription errors.
29:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It works in Gmail, Slack, NoShine, Cloud, IMS, wherever you type.
29:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And unlike the built-in dictation on your phone, whisper flow actually removes all filler words, mid-sentence corrections, and jargon.
29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: What I love most too is that it perfectly matches my style.
29:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So I often type in all lowercase letters and say things like LMK, which means let me know in shorthand, and it auto-adjusts it for me.
29:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Like many of you, I also do a lot of brain dumping into LLMs.
29:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of typing it all out, I just speak my windy train of thought into whisper flow, which is infinitely faster than trying to get my fingers to keep up with the pace of my thoughts.
30:02
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30:07
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30:13
[SPEAKER_00]: That's rf.wisperflow.wisperflow.wsprflo.au.au.
30:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well I think there's like two sides of that one.
30:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you're like a very early adopter and I think it'll be a while before everyone is deploying agency to the extent that you are.
30:26
[SPEAKER_01]: To I think that it depends like the type of content in newsletters that you're receiving right so I think for a lot of like.
30:34
[SPEAKER_01]: whether it's deals or like what's happening in the startup ecosystem, like because your agent knows you so well and it knows what you're interested in and has access to your notes and your meetings and everything else in your life.
30:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Being able to extract those insights and pull it into whatever your consuming that information, I think is super valuable.
30:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I still, it's kind of like what reminds me of is like,
30:52
[SPEAKER_01]: you can get summaries from books but people still buy books type of thing like there's a lot of newsletters like sure there's some that I skim there's some that I read every word and like look forward to because I think it's so well written or the way that they present information and obviously the same with books you can apply to some newsletters they're entertainment as well and it's read for enjoyment so I think you are like efficiency like maxing essentially out of that consuming information and getting it to your age which I think is super valuable.
31:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I think, so that's not to dissuade you from, I think that is a real use case and I think we're going to see more and more of that.
31:26
[SPEAKER_01]: What I think is really interesting is, I think I saw that recently that more of the internet is being
31:34
[SPEAKER_01]: used or are leveraged by agents than like humans or I don't really the exact framing of it, but like agents can make spend 24-7 just like crawling different websites, consuming information.
31:43
[SPEAKER_01]: People are awake for certain hours a day.
31:44
[SPEAKER_01]: They go to different web pages.
31:45
[SPEAKER_01]: They read whatever information.
31:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I do think we're going to see a broader shift where if the majority of the internet is actually used by agents instead of humans, which is the way it's been from the beginning.
31:57
[SPEAKER_01]: how do you compensate content creators for content that is being scraped and read by agents instead of people, because typically the model has been ads and you get a human to read your article and while either reading whatever article that they're interested in, there's an ad that pops up that they either click on, which they get compensated for or it's just like an impression based ad.
32:22
[SPEAKER_01]: agents and robots don't really care about ads.
32:23
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't look at ads like that.
32:25
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not super relevant to them.
32:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So how do you take that page view and compensate the content creator?
32:32
[SPEAKER_01]: We're very early in thinking about this.
32:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I know there's other companies like Cloud Flair and others in the startup ecosystem who are starting to think more about what is the trade between an agent and whoever's own behalf of that agent and the person who created that content.
32:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll say it's like on our road map-ish, like we're still kind of working through what that looks like.
32:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like kind of too early to say all that much more, but it could have been involved like a whole new micro payments, it's like something that everyone has like been promising on the internet forever.
33:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's never really worked out.
33:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Micro payments for agents with like the right wallets and then you can even get like crypto involved in there.
33:08
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of like,
33:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Converging technology that would make that possible because what you don't want is the people who are investing in investigative journalism or whatever type of reporting in media Who only were able to do that work because they had ads on their website that and they were getting paid if those pages aren't being read by humans and most of the agents They can't get paid for that.
33:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Thus that journalism never gets done.
33:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Thus that information doesn't exist.
33:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think Matthew prints from Cloudflowers, like I said a lot about this.
33:36
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like an existential threat to the internet because if you break down the incentive structure and those content creators don't get paid and I say content creators very broadly.
33:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I would even consider like the New York Times like true, like investigative journalists, I'll just bucket them in there as well.
33:51
[SPEAKER_01]: If they can't get paid for their work, like then there's no money to go around to continue to do that work.
33:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think it's like, I actually like a much larger.
33:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So I said, it was a very loaded question.
33:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Cause like, I have my own personal consumer behaviors and thoughts around that, which I started with around, I still think there's a lot of value in reading myself a lot of the newsletters on the platform level.
34:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And on the internet level, I think there's almost an existential shift of how do we build this new economy that benefits those who are creating content.
34:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, you beat me to my second question, which is going to be about like the business model itself, which I think is what's so tricky and scary quite frankly, because we do need to have free speech, we need to do need to incentivize truly thoughtful journalists to create content as opposed to just click baby polarizing stuff that we see now.
34:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk a little bit about the really, really cool journalism initiatives you guys have been working on.
34:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think a lot of people look at Beehive and think of you as a creator economy,
34:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Business that focuses on a content creator or a VC like myself who wants to have a blog, basically.
34:54
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually, you guys have done some really, really cool stuff with journalists that are at these legacy institutions that either get let go or over the bureaucracy and they want to reach the readers directly.
35:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell everyone a little bit about how you're supporting journalists and what are some of the cool initiatives that you as have launched recently?
35:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it started with Oliver Darcy, who left CNN and he before I had met him or he met anyone from our team looked at the ecosystem of platforms and showed to be high.
35:23
[SPEAKER_01]: He is based in New York.
35:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a trip to New York two years ago and our head of talent got in contact with him.
35:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, hey, you guys should meet.
35:29
[SPEAKER_01]: We had breakfast.
35:31
[SPEAKER_01]: No agenda, but he ended up kind of complaining for lack of better words of, here's all the things that used to be taking care for me at CNN that I no longer have access to.
35:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't have legal support.
35:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have health insurance.
35:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing my own accounting and bookkeeping.
35:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have like any editorial support around me.
35:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the time, listening to him run through this list of complaints, more or less, I kind of came to the realization, I'm like, we want more people like Oliver who feel the need to go independent, to have a place to go independent and do it successfully.
36:06
[SPEAKER_01]: We as a platform, I don't think we can, the business model doesn't make sense, but I think we, we have at least more resources as a venture back start up to support that.
36:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And I left that meeting, which quickly turned into presenting this idea of like a VIP journalist program, which we now call the Beehive Media Collective, and it more or less addresses everyone of his point of concerns.
36:27
[SPEAKER_01]: We provide a legal coverage to these journalists and outlets.
36:31
[SPEAKER_01]: We provide health insurance.
36:32
[SPEAKER_01]: We provide giddy images.
36:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We have someone on our staff that's always
36:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And we created this collective where they also have access to each other and they share like different tips and strategies and different things to help benefit everyone as part of it today.
36:51
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a multimillion dollar commitment that we've invested in.
36:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It is coming up on our second year.
36:57
[SPEAKER_01]: We have 30 journalists and outlets all like very wildly successful.
37:03
[SPEAKER_01]: The nerve is immediate collective in the UK with five women.
37:07
[SPEAKER_01]: They had a thousand paid subscribers in their first week, Oliver going back to his example.
37:13
[SPEAKER_01]: They surpassed 100,000 subscribers and a million dollars in revenue in their first year.
37:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Now have four full-time employees.
37:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So if we've seen a lot of success out of the program.
37:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think really what we want to be able to do is say that behalf can be a place where if the larger walls of the institution no longer fit you and you have that entrepreneurial drive, we know that it is a scary leap to take and how do we make that less scary and provide you to the support to do that type of important journalism and it's been a huge success for us.
37:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it's awesome and like I actually sent a tweet today about how like more LPs should give health insurance to fund managers.
37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like kind of the same concept like if you're going to be an entrepreneur like health insurance legal support like access to get images like all these things.
37:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They really go a long way and if nothing else it build such good good will in the ecosystem that they're going to tell their friends oh yeah, but you have is more than just a platform like they actually care about us and that will go very, very long way.
38:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
38:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I talk a lot about the art and science of building a company because as you grow in mature as a company we've brought along we have an incredible CFO and an incredible CO.
38:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I just like picking on them on this example.
38:19
[SPEAKER_01]: They're very P&L numbers driven and they should be.
38:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But to them, it's how much money we're investing in this and how much are we going to get out of this.
38:27
[SPEAKER_01]: The B5 Media Collective is not profitable at all, like it is very expensive to do the health insurance and do the legal for all of these journalists.
38:36
[SPEAKER_01]: But the halo effect that we have created around the brand of being a company that stands up for independent media and supports these journalists.
38:43
[SPEAKER_01]: in their circles who they go to and talk about how amazing and experience that they have that they have the smartest people at our company right by their side answering their phone call is helping them giving them this health insurance and everything else like that goes so much further than what we could ever see on a piano and so it's this constant battle um... and like it's good that i am very on the art side and they're very on the science piano side because i think we met out somewhere in the middle but i think
39:09
[SPEAKER_01]: a lot of founders should be wary of at some point when every decision is being decided by what's the ROI and the P&L, like you lose a lot of the fun spontaneity and art side of building a business.
39:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and like, why be in such a creative industry, if you're not going to have fun, you know, like, exactly, spending spending money is so much fun.
39:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I could always, you could always spend more money.
39:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
39:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I want to get your gut check on quality versus quantity.
39:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is something else I see with newsletters just to jump back to that real fast.
39:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the journalists have some interesting insights here.
39:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people think they need to send like a weekly or a daily newsletter.
39:41
[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of in the norm.
39:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But back to your comment earlier about how newsletters remind you a bit of books like you sort of like invest a lot into this one work And then you share it with people and people should read it word for word.
39:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I have this thesis and maybe I'm in drinking my own cool late, but like we should only really share newsletters and leave something to say and that's why like for at least all my fun Like, you know, sometimes I'll write an essay once a month and sometimes I'll go three months without writing something because I don't really have something to say
40:05
[SPEAKER_00]: and I find that it's more authentic and I find that people are more engaged and want to read word for word because of it.
40:10
[SPEAKER_00]: What's your advice to newsletter creators and even just like content creators in general about balancing quantity versus quality and does it really matter to like stay top of mind and be consistent or do you think that actually as like the years come and there's so much slap everywhere that keeping that quality bar is actually the most important.
40:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So here's a problem I hear constantly from operators.
40:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The data exists, and the answers are somewhere in there, but getting to them, actually pulling a useful insight without bugging the data team or learning sequel, takes too long or just does not happen.
40:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Hex solves that.
40:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Hex is an AI analytics platform where any one on your team can ask data questions in plain English and get real answers backed by your actual business context.
40:46
[SPEAKER_00]: No sequel required.
40:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And the best part is that hex shows you exactly how it's
40:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The more your team uses it, the smarter it gets.
40:57
[SPEAKER_00]: From seed stage founders running lean to larger orgs dealing with serious data complexity, hex is built to scale with you.
41:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It's game-changing for people like me in particular who want to understand what's going on under the hood, but are not the real data experts.
41:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny too because I feel like every time I look over my operator friend's shoulders, whether they're in product or marketing or ops, they often have a hex dashboard pulled up.
41:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Trailblazers listeners get an exclusive 30-day free trial at hex.ai slash trailblazers.
41:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That's HEX.ai slash trailblazers.
41:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean the cheat answers both, right, which is easier said than done.
41:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
41:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I love your thesis, right?
41:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Like there's a few writers and content creators that I've come across who say I have no schedule.
41:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like whenever I'm struck by inspiration and have something worthwhile saying, then I will put it out in the world and until then I'm not going to publish anything.
41:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in a way that comes from like a place of privilege where like the new setters in your primary business right it is like it is an incredible flywheel that you have to engage your LPs and entrepreneurs that you've invested in.
42:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think that's like your main business the same way that I think a lot of the other people that I've heard say that are it's like Paul Graham who really doesn't essay like every like nine months right like I think if you are getting started as a content creator consistency is super important.
42:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Morning brew, we sent the newsletter 6 a.m. Eastern time Monday through Friday.
42:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I think you do want to build a behavior, like a consumer, have it around the content that you're creating.
42:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, Scott Gaillet, Galway's newsletter goes out Friday afternoon, like, right?
42:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I, I know when people are sending things and if you're good, people will know when you miss it.
42:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
42:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I would hope if I didn't send my newsletter this morning on Tuesday that I would've got in a few texts, but I've never missed a newsletter being like, yeah, what's going on?
42:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, where's the newsletter?
42:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can test that one.
42:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I was going to say, then you know that you're like, does no one read this thing?
42:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is no one text it?
42:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of like when, whenever you have like an outage that has started up and like everyone's so pissed off at you and it's like the inverses like a lot worse.
42:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you ever went down for an hour and no one message you or emailed you, I mean, it's like no one's really dependent on your product.
43:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a good KPI for product market fit that like what percentage of your people are angry because you didn't totally.
43:05
[SPEAKER_01]: The second we go down for a minute, which thank God recently has not happened much at all.
43:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Knock on wood.
43:09
[SPEAKER_01]: We let it little knock on wood.
43:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
43:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I get text and calls immediately from like users I haven't talked to in the years just yelling at me.
43:17
[SPEAKER_01]: So like, which is great.
43:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it sucks, but it's great that they depend so much on the product and that we are a part of their day-to-day life.
43:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That would be me though.
43:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if you guys went down, that would be me.
43:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I linked to be high too much that I would be problematic.
43:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would notice.
43:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, you can lean on me if you know.
43:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Perfect at least once a day.
43:33
[SPEAKER_01]: You can be our page or duty.
43:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah exactly exactly.
43:35
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah to answer your question I think it depends like I think if you're like a new content creator I think consistency super important.
43:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's what this one makes like a great content creator right like the fact that you can do it consistently and not sacrifice quality like you kind of gave the trade off between quantity and quality The best of the best can do both right like Ben Thompson three times a week is putting out like the best pieces of like tech strategy journalism that I've ever seen and and I love it
44:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, I'd never finished one of his pieces.
44:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, oh, that wasn't that good.
44:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But like, he doesn't like take off a week if he doesn't have anything to say.
44:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, he's able to turn any story or narrative into like an incredible piece of content.
44:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's what it takes to kind of stand out.
44:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
44:13
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the difference between good and great.
44:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like you can kind of do both.
44:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
44:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Just back to your earlier conversation about your engineering first team, but you're also a great storyteller.
44:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Our insights, it's like juxtaposition being able to balance both of these things is really what makes you amazing.
44:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I do have one final question and then I'll let you go.
44:27
[SPEAKER_00]: What is one thing everyone gets wrong about creators?
44:31
[SPEAKER_01]: that is a great question.
44:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Because again, creators is such a broad term.
44:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I still think like the Nomenclature around creator is like, I'm an influencer who posts on TikTok or Instagram that's doing like some brand affiliate deal.
44:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I, earlier, I don't know if they like it.
44:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I grew like the New York Times and with broader creators.
44:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I think like anyone who's creating content, very broad, right?
44:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I think creator and influencer have become too intertwined.
44:57
[SPEAKER_01]: When really it's like anyone who is producing content should be considered some sort of creator.
45:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think we're still evolving from the creator economy.
45:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I've said a few times.
45:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the creator economy is the future of media.
45:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I think people are still sleeping on how big it is.
45:13
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw the box office, right?
45:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Like those two films that went like make of our own crush it on like a million dollar budget.
45:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the power of these people that have an, I see it.
45:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I would stop like, in Canada, this like creator economy party, like every five minutes, someone, a 25-year-old came off to me, like I've read your news that every week, it's helped me so much.
45:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, these people that have audiences have so much influence, and when used for good, I think it can help and there's full business models to be built around them.
45:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So I still think, like, what do most people, like, misconceive about creators, they think it's,
45:47
[SPEAKER_01]: short-form UGC video pushing some product.
45:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the most successful creators today are multi-channel.
45:54
[SPEAKER_01]: They have producing really valuable content that people depend on, but they're also able to host IRL events or courses or host to community.
46:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And going back to the magician, right?
46:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, nothing's really too niche.
46:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think many people would think a decade ago that you could have a passion about magic and create a 10,000
46:14
[SPEAKER_01]: magicians, and to be considered a creator, but to build a lifestyle in a business around that, I think is super empowering and very promising.
46:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
46:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You please tell me no Megan at Slow Ventures.
46:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course.
46:25
[SPEAKER_00]: She's just told me about this like, Bowding creator.
46:27
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, slow slow does such an incredible job of finding the most niche content creators was like, and again, going back to like what Ben Thompson said, like the internet so much bigger than people give a credit for like, I've learned like nothing is too niche.
46:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you like,
46:40
[SPEAKER_01]: anything.
46:41
[SPEAKER_01]: The odds that there's 100,000 other people out there in the world that love that exact same thing is so high and so hopefully tools like behind play a small part of making it possible to be able to have a voice online and build a business around it.
46:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
46:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Tyler, thank you for being here.
46:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me.
46:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Appreciate it.
46:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to Trailblazers.
46:58
[SPEAKER_00]: If you found this conversation valuable, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review.
47:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of all, please subscribe to our channel.
47:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It helps more contrarian builders find us.
47:09
[SPEAKER_00]: To learn more about this podcast, you can visit Trailblazerspod.com.
47:12
[SPEAKER_00]: To learn more about our venture capital firm, you can visit parkrangerscapt.com or just follow along on socials at Erica Under Score Wenger.