Latest / Content, Briefly / CEO Tyler Denk wants beehiiv to be Shopify, not Amazon

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CEO Tyler Denk wants beehiiv to be Shopify, not Amazon · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey, team. Alex here today with a conversation I am really excited about. It's an interview with Tyler Dink, the co-founder and CEO of Beehiiv.
• 0:13
  In the late twenty tens, Tyler was one of the first hires at Morning Brew, the email newsletter media brand that really set the tone for what email newsletters have become today.
• 0:23
  Tyler talks about how building Morning Brew required just a wild amount of daily operational MacGyvering to get around some of the constraints of the email tools at the time.
• 0:33
  It was that experience that led Tyler to start Beehiiv in twenty twenty-one with the vision of building the newsletter platform for the future.
• 0:39
  The past few months have seen a major turning point as Beehiiv has branched outside of email into podcasts, communities, and really everything a creator-led media brand needs.
• 0:49
  In this conversation, Tyler and I talk a bit about his origin story, what he sees changing in the media landscape, his vision for Beehiiv, and how that vision looks different than the vision of some of his competitors and their peer cohort.
• 1:02
  Think about Sub Stack or Patreon. Also, on September seventeenth, we are hosting a webinar with Tyler to go even deeper on some of these topics. We'll have the link for that in the show notes.
• 1:13
  I was pumped to get a chance to talk to Tyler, and I hope you enjoy. All right, onto the episode. Tyler, welcome to Content Briefly. Awesome to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 1:23
  Been looking forward to this for a while. So in our community, we're very familiar with Beehiiv generally, and a lot of people know your backstory, kind of your experience at Morning Brew.
• 1:33
  But I think a lot of people just wanna hear a little bit of the story from your perspective and, and the vision for Beehiiv. Going back to, was it five years ago now that you- Yeah... started Beehiiv?
• 1:42
  Yeah, I mean, we, we launched officially about four years, but we did a year of building prior to actually launching, so yeah, about five years. Sweet. Well, it, it's interesting kind of looking back to that time period.
• 1:53
  Uh, if you were to ask me four or five years ago, "Hey, do we need another email platform?"
• 1:58
  I don't think that would be the first thing that, that came to mind is like, "Yes, we need another, like, email platform, newsletter platform out there."
• 2:06
  I'm curious what you saw in that moment and what you saw about where media was, was headed.
• 2:12
  Yeah, I think to answer that question, we'd go prior to five years and tell a little bit of the Morning Brew story 'cause that really is the impetus for giving me the insight to build Beehiiv.
• 2:20
  But to start there, and, and for anyone who's unfamiliar with this story, I joined Morning Brew back in twenty seventeen as the second employee.
• 2:27
  One of the first things I did was I built the referral program, which helped turn our existing readers into more readers by recruiting their friends and family in exchange for different rewards.
• 2:37
  That helped us grow by a million subscribers, so it was wildly successful. One of the second projects that I built was we had our content team at the time.
• 2:45
  They would create their content in a Google Doc, and they would one... line by line copy and paste the title into an HTML template that said, "Put title here."
• 2:53
  And then they would put the story at the next line, and then I had to teach the writers how to use like a paragraph tag to open, like HTML, to create a new paragraph in the same story.
• 3:02
  And so the writer, at the time there was only one, every day would end his day at seven, eight o'clock after writing a Google Doc all day, by spending two hours copy and pasting his content into this HTML template, which I would then copy and paste into MailChimp and run a few tests and set it.
• 3:18
  Very unscalable way to build a media or content organization. And so I was a twenty-four-year-old, probably naive and a little bit arrogant, and thought I could build anything as a self-taught software developer.
• 3:32
  And I built a CMS that was custom-built for email. So CMS stands for content management system. All the other CMS's were built for WordPress or websites 'cause most media orgs and content orgs were for web.
• 3:44
  But we viewed ourself as very different. We were an email-first media company, and no CMS did email as well as we needed it to. So I spent three months.
• 3:52
  I built something called Oslo, and it was like our own homegrown CMS, and it allowed our writers to build and craft these beautiful HTML emails. They never had to touch the code whatsoever.
• 4:02
  After building Oslo, the next bottleneck at the business was our sales team. And the way that Morning Brew generated revenue was sponsorships.
• 4:10
  At the time, Morning Brew had a daily newsletter, and then we also started spinning out different vertical newsletters, so emerging tech, retail, HR. Each newsletter had two to three advertisers per newsletter.
• 4:21
  And when you have three different newsletters, some going out daily, some going out twice a week, two to three advertisers per newsletter, we were managing thirty-plus advertisers any given week.
• 4:31
  And the team naturally was doing all of that in Google Docs.
• 4:34
  That led to a lot of last minute, ten o'clock at night, realizing that the advertiser hasn't signed off on the ad copy or the creative, and we can't go live with the sixty thousand dollar placement the next day at six AM.
• 4:45
  So knowing that that was a huge bottleneck, I built this ad management platform that allowed us to, one, three weeks before the campaign went live, the advertiser received a notification. They uploaded their assets.
• 4:56
  It integrated with our creative team. They got official sign-off weeks in advance. It integrated with our CMS.
• 5:01
  And it was like a well-oiled machine to scale our sponsorship and partnerships from, I don't know, maybe five, ten million to doubling that next year.
• 5:09
  So I give all that context because at Morning Brew, the way that I describe Morning Brew is incredible creative talent and amazing content built and powered by a total custom-built ecosystem.
• 5:19
  I saw up close and personal building all this custom tech, how it allowed our writers to do more, how it allowed our sales team and partnerships team to do more, and how it allowed the business to grow.
• 5:28
  And if you take a step back at that ecosystem that I inherited, even before building any of that, the typical way that people would create content online was they would post on their WordPress website or blog.
• 5:38
  They would copy and paste that content into MailChimp to send a newsletter. And if they wanted ads to monetize, they would drop in like a live intent banner.
• 5:46
  If they wanted a referral program, there's like a third party for that. If they wanted subscription revenue, they would use Stripe or Memberful and have to integrate some other like third party platform.
• 5:55
  And very quickly, you see these marketers and journalists and writers trying to stitch together six or seven different platforms as a non-technical writer, and there was just no chance of success.
• 6:05
  That was the content ecosystem, call it six or seven years ago. We were able to build our way out of that and build a custom solution to make Morning Brew really scale. W-we scaled to over twenty million in revenue.
• 6:16
  We got acquired for seventy-five million, and a lot of that was on the back of this custom-built tech.
• 6:20
  Throughout that journey, the thing that's amazing about email is people can just hit Reply and respond right back to the person who wrote the newsletter. Morning Brew would receive thousands of replies every day.
• 6:29
  90% of them were about, "Hey, I hated this story. Hey, this was too political." Like, uh, people complaining about the actual content.
• 6:35
  But I'd say, like, 10% of the replies were, "Hey, I run a newsletter for my business," or, "I am a journalist at this company," or, "I have this hobby newsletter, but they don't look as good as yours.
• 6:45
  They're not styled the same way. I'm not growing as fast as you are. So, like, how are you growing? What data are you looking at, and how are you making these emails look so good in the inbox?"
• 6:53
  And they were hoping that I was going to say, "We use X platform." Yeah. But the truth was it was a custom-built solution.
• 6:59
  That was really the impetus for seeing that there was a huge gap in the market and something that we could bring to market with Beehiiv.
• 7:04
  So what I'm hearing is kind of the, the dual things of the ad management piece, and the reason why you customized all this was, like, you had a very specific style.
• 7:13
  You wanted it to look a certain way, and like, I think back to my email days back in, in that same time period, and it's like, uh, you know, I was mainly on HubSpot at the time, sending HubSpot emails, and it's like, oh, they always look the same, right?
• 7:24
  So that was the key for you. You had a very specific Morning Brew brand, and you had to have the design the exact right way, and, and to do that, you needed to build your own tool for it. I'd say design was part of it.
• 7:36
  Process was the other one. We had different constituent parts where, like, a typical drag-and-drop builder in like a Mailchimp or HubSpot didn't do what we wanted to do. Yeah.
• 7:43
  One, like, no writer wants to build content and stories in a drag-and-drop builder on Mailchimp or HubSpot. It wasn't conducive to, like, the writing environment that they would expect.
• 7:54
  The other one was process, so we had a top blurb. We had five story sections. We had an ad section. We had a What Else Is Brewing, which is like a roundup of different stories.
• 8:03
  Very specific to us, but like, again, not something we wanted to build in a template.
• 8:07
  We, we custom-built the software so they could drop five links, and it would turn into the What Else Is Brewing section, or it would talk to this ad management platform and integrate this ad that had already been signed off by the advertiser.
• 8:17
  And the writer doesn't have to think about ads ever. 'Cause previously, the writer, who should have no business, and typically in most media orgs, there's like a, a separation of church and state.
• 8:26
  But the writer should have no business looking at the ad and, and formatting it and doing testing. But in the old way of doing things, it was all just one template. Here, the ad slid in exactly where it needed to.
• 8:35
  The writer could ignore it entirely and know that it was taken care of. I'd say half process, half design. When you went to build Beehiiv, what was the first thing that you wanted to, to solve for?
• 8:45
  I'm a little bit unfamiliar with the very first year of, of Beehiiv and what the, the first problem you tackled was.
• 8:50
  So that's my first question, and the second question is when you went to build Beehiiv, was it going to be an email platform, or did you always have the vision for what we're now seeing, which is full-on media suite of podcast and community and everything else we've seen you launch in the past year?
• 9:05
  Was that in your mind from the very beginning? Or at first, were you like, "I just wanna build a better email platform" that reflects the tool that you built at, at Morning Brew?
• 9:14
  I'd say for the first three years of the business, we stuck to a plan that was very concrete, and we didn't deviate much, which was, well, let's build the best newsletter platform.
• 9:23
  What we did go to market with, and, and to answer your question of, like, what was our value prop, there were, like, two things of where I saw a huge opportunity.
• 9:29
  One was, again, we would receive so many emails from readers. The number one thing they wanted was the referral program, funny enough, 'cause it worked so well. Mm.
• 9:36
  And there were a bunch of, like, knockoff SaaS platforms that tried to build a referral program in a box that, like, never really worked that well, that just totally ripped off what we had built.
• 9:43
  And our initial thesis was every content creator wants to grow a larger audience. This referral program worked extremely well for us.
• 9:50
  We are going to build an email newsletter platform that has the exact same referral program out of the box that anyone can use.
• 9:56
  So it's like where you look at Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, HubSpot, they help you send emails. They don't help you grow your audience. We wanted to be a newsletter platform that helps you grow your audience.
• 10:05
  That was the first wedge into the market. The second thing was always the thesis, but not one that we launched with, was the ad network. Morning Brew was 100% ad-based at the time.
• 10:14
  We were doing 20 million-plus in revenue purely through sponsorships, but I knew inside what the Morning Brew machine looked like, and we had 20 people on this brand partnerships team building relationships with agencies and advertisers, selling them on these large packages to sponsor the newsletter.
• 10:29
  And then when I looked on Twitter at all of these writers and journalists who were launching their own newsletters, they're amazing, and they have 30,000 followers or newsletter subscribers 'cause they're so good at writing about sports or politics.
• 10:40
  That doesn't mean that they wanna talk to Nike and Adidas to sell sponsorships.
• 10:44
  Substack entered the market in 2017, so like four years before us, with the thesis that the only proper way to monetize content on the internet is subscription.
• 10:53
  And I knew that was bullshit because I saw Morning Brew, which was ad-based. Saw Axios, which was ad-based. Saw The Hustle, saw The Skimm, saw all of these massive newsletter media companies that were all ads-based.
• 11:03
  The thing is, your everyday content creator can't also do ad sales. That's a totally different competency, and nor sh- should they have to.
• 11:09
  And so my thesis from day one was like, let's build the largest ad network for newsletters where we can, at scale, and we have tens of thousands today, approaching 100,000 different content creators, we can go to Nike and Netflix and HubSpot and say, "If you want women in their 30s who are interested in wellness, we have thousands of newsletters that fit that exact persona."
• 11:27
  And on the inverse of that, that means that these content creators don't have to do ad sales themselves, but they have these amazing sponsorship opportunities, so they can generate revenue, reinvest that in growth, and continue to create more content.
• 11:39
  So from day one, the ad network was always our big bet. But kind of working backwards, you can't have an ad network if you only have a few hundred or a few thousand impressions, right?
• 11:47
  You can only have an ad network if you're doing... Right now, I think we're sending four billion emails a month.
• 11:51
  That's a large enough number where brands will pay attention when we say that we can get in front of these really niche audiences. That was kinda the thesis. One was growth.
• 11:58
  That was the, that was riding the wave of the Morning Brew success story and having the Morning Brew referral program built into the platform.
• 12:05
  And then two was monetization, which is the Beehiiv ad network and making sure that every content creator could monetize their content, similar to what YouTube did for video creators.
• 12:14
  Looking back four years, is there anything with the initial thesis that you either got wrong or have corrected a bit as you've seen the way the, the landscape is changing now?
• 12:24
  No, I, if anything, I think we haven't gone hard enough on the Beehiiv ad network. We- Mm-hmm... that, that will change very soon.
• 12:29
  W- I think it's one of our biggest competitive advantages, and, and now that we have launched podcasts and some of these other surface areas, in my pitch deck from when we raised our seed round, I used to say, "We wanna build the Facebook ad manager for email."
• 12:40
  And someone humbled me, and they were like, "You're not actually thinking large enough.
• 12:43
  You should be the Facebook ad manager for creators around the world, whether it's their podcast or their newsletter or their website. You should help them monetize all of their different assets."
• 12:53
  Um, so I think that leads into kind of what you asked last time of, like, did we know that we were gonna do podcasts and everything else? Genuinely, no.
• 12:58
  I think Substack's Core innovation was they bundled email, website, and subscriptions into a single platform, so people and writers didn't have to manage WordPress and MailChimp and Memberful. Mm-hmm.
• 13:10
  I knew that that was an advantage from my Morning Brew experience, and they got there first, but, like, that became the standard of, like, we had to go to market with bundling those three.
• 13:18
  As we started investing in the website, people naturally started asking, "Hey, I wanna sell products," or, "I also have a podcast, and it's on this other website, but now I have two websites. What do I do with this?"
• 13:28
  Slowly but surely, I saw the value in consolidation. A lot of content creators don't want to manage six different platforms. They don't wanna have six different subscriptions.
• 13:37
  As far as understanding who your thousand true fans are, like, who actually engages with your content, it's hard to piece that together when some of your data lives in the email platform, some is in the website, some is in Google Analytics, some's in your podcast player.
• 13:48
  We just saw a lot of value in consolidation, and we knew that our competitive advantage was product velocity. And when people log into Beehiiv daily, they love using it.
• 13:56
  When they log into their podcast platform, which they could barely name who their podcast host is, it doesn't work that great, and if I look at the trajectory, I'd rather log into Beehiiv and have everything run from there.
• 14:05
  When you launched podcasts, I was like... I was on there in two days. Oh, this is a no-brainer. Obviously, [laughs] I wanted it the same platform. Our former platform, I was like, "I have no loyalties."
• 14:13
  [laughs] Totally, and, and that was actually really annoying. Like, I, I, I'm a huge podcast consumer. I probably listen to may- maybe 20 hours of podcasts a week. But I was not super familiar with the hosting solutions.
• 14:22
  As we started testing the market before we rolled out the podcast feature, we were asking people, like, "Who do you use for hosting?" And people were like, "Dude, I don't even know. Don't, don't care.
• 14:30
  Don't care, and, like, I would happily move over." Podcast is actually one of the space I'm most bullish on.
• 14:33
  I think there's so much innovation to be done there, and I think we're in, like, a pretty prime position to win that market.
• 14:38
  But yeah, lo- long way of answering your question of, like, the thesis initially, I think we were really strong on. We've listened to our customers a lot, and I, I think there's a lot of value in consolidation.
• 14:47
  That's kinda been our theme and thesis for the past couple of months. Obviously, there's a lot of big media trends right now.
• 14:52
  To what degree are you kind of being like, "Where do we sit in this arc of media and where things are changing, and that, that drives direction," versus like, "Hey, this is what our creators are asking for tomorrow, and therefore we're gonna build it because there's a lot of demand for this"?
• 15:04
  There's probably, like, three things that come to mind. One is what you call traditional media or legacy media. We've seen the secular decline in, obviously, like, radio, television, the large media companies.
• 15:18
  There's definitely value for that, and on a much more journalistic perspective, sending people to the Middle East to do reporting there is not something I think an independent journalist can really do by themselves.
• 15:27
  It really does take an institution like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal to do, like, deep investigative reporting, which I think is amazing for democracy.
• 15:34
  It's a difficult business model 'cause sending someone in the Middle East is very expensive, and when you re- write that story and every other outlet just quotes that story, I actually think consumers don't really care who the firsthand source is as long as they're getting the information, which is a very unfortunate truth about the business model of media.
• 15:50
  But that's, like, legacy media.
• 15:51
  We have quite a few independent journalists that have left, like, a CNN or New York Times or Wall Street Journal, uh, Oliver Darcy, Joanna Stern, a lot of big-name journalists who are going independent.
• 16:01
  I think that's a trend that will continue. Caveat is I don't think every good journalist is meant to go independent. It really does take an entrepreneurial muscle.
• 16:08
  Because you're amazing at creating content and getting scoops does not mean you know how to build the right paywalls and subscription win-backs and, like, actually scale a business.
• 16:17
  But I do think there are quite a lot of them who are having success.
• 16:20
  So I think that's one trend in how I think about media, which is probably, unfortunately, the decline of legacy media, but that being displaced by similar work being done in more independent outlets.
• 16:30
  The second trend, which I'm most bullish on, is I think the creator economy is the future of media. You're seeing it everywhere in terms of, like, where do people get information? Where are people spending their time?
• 16:40
  Even though creator economy seems like it's been around for a while, we are, like, day one of creator economy. We're so early there.
• 16:47
  Hopefully, as tools like Beehiiv and others exist, it actually facilitates more people going this creator route. And then the third actually is, like, probably pretty relevant to you and your audience.
• 16:56
  I do think content marketing and, like, business content marketing is having this massive resurgence.
• 17:01
  Amount of large companies, Anthropic included, that are hiring lead editors and storytellers is a trend that I think is going to stick around.
• 17:09
  In a world where anyone can create content with AI, and there's this proliferation of very mediocre content, there's a real premium on being able to break out by having very differentiated content.
• 17:20
  I think the most sophisticated software companies, whether it is HubSpot or Robinhood and all of these other companies that have built an entire media org for content marketing, knowing that they can drive ROI by playing the long game rather than just performance marketing, I think we're going to see an explosion of companies creating really high-quality content as part of content marketing, and that will be a pretty large part of this media mix.
• 17:42
  Yeah. We actually had on this podcast, I think last fall, our founder, uh, Jimmy Daly. He's gone back in-house, but he came on the podcast to talk about going newsletter first.
• 17:54
  I, I think this is, like, a big thing happening in our community right now, which is full of folks that are used to the world of blogs first and foremost, and kind of this idea, this time period where, like, the goal of content marketing was, "Hey, we're just gonna write a lot of content.
• 18:07
  The goal is get found in Google searches. That's how we measure success," to that kind of model is broken, and we need to be thinking distribution first.
• 18:14
  Now, we've got a lot of folks that are thinking, "Okay, so should that just be newsletter-centric?" It, it just...
• 18:20
  It's really cool to see how you've built Beehiiv to kind of reflect what we already see going on in our content marketing space, folks that are thinking, "I've gotta go multi-medium. I've gotta think about podcast.
• 18:31
  I've gotta think about video." Um, it's, it's just, like, an interesting thing that's, that's changing in our space.
• 18:36
  Now, as you look at what Beehiiv is gonna be doing in the next few years, to the extent that you can, pitch me the vision for, like, where you are headed and how you think about differentiating versus some of the legacy competitors out there and then also some of your peer competitors that, that rose up about the same time.
• 18:53
  I actually think you kind of nailed just now, like, the vision of what we're building. Our roadmap has evolved with both creators and content marketers of, like, what it means to be a great creator.
• 19:02
  I think maybe five years ago, creators were email only or video only or TikTok only, and Today, you're seeing the most sophisticated and successful creators are typically multi-channel, and it's that, uh, confluence that makes them so durable, which is exactly what our roadmap aligns.
• 19:18
  Like, we were ideally just targeting newsletter-first operators and then launch podcasts and then community. Uh, video will play a part of what we're building in the future.
• 19:26
  Same with content, uh, or content marketers as well. Um, as far as, like, w- how we, like, kind of differentiate and see the diverging trends, a lot of our initial competitors were core email platforms.
• 19:37
  So MailChimp, HubSpot, Campaign Monitor, Sailthru. Email 1.0 is what I'd call them. They don't help you grow. They don't help you monetize. They aren't multi-channel. They're primarily just email.
• 19:48
  So that means you're kind of on your own to, like, figure out the blog component and to figure out the monetization component and to attach the data analytics on top of this email to figure out who is your audience and who is your customer and how do you convert them.
• 19:59
  As far as, like, the newer age competitors, two that come to mind are Substack and Patreon. I think we differ from both of them for a lot of reasons. One is, like, business model.
• 20:08
  We charge you a flat rate based on how large your list is, and we have a bunch of other features that come included with those plans.
• 20:14
  Both of them are more what I consider predatory take rate m- business models, where they take ten percent of your earnings. Patreon has increased the take rate previously.
• 20:23
  Every other take rate business that has ever existed typically only goes one way. When they need to generate more revenue, they increase the take rate.
• 20:30
  So the playbook for most of those businesses are: how do we get people on the platform for free? How do we take a percentage of their earnings?
• 20:37
  And then how do we make it harder and harder to leave and do quietly and slowly very insidious things that makes it so difficult to leave that if we were hypothetically to increase the take rate from ten percent to fifteen percent, they will bitch and moan, but there's no way for them to leave because they're so entrapped in this ecosystem.
• 20:54
  And I think we have a totally different perspective. We don't take a take rate. We don't take a dollar or percentage of any revenue generated on the platform. We are super into data portability.
• 21:04
  If we are not serving you, you can export your list, your content, your subscriptions, and go somewhere else. We encourage that. We don't want you to be locked into our platform if you don't like using the platform.
• 21:13
  So I think those are some of, like, the, the big differences. The others a-around those two specifically is they very much intermediate between you and your audience.
• 21:23
  So, like, you launch a Substack, and the Substack app is the destination. I get tons of emails, not from the people that I subscribe to on Substack, but from Substack themselves.
• 21:33
  So it really comes down to, like, who really owns the customer relationship and the data?
• 21:37
  And I think it's been very clear on both of those platforms that it's not the creator, it's the platform that's really dictating everything. We are the complete opposite.
• 21:44
  The Amazon versus Shopify analogy is one that usually holds pretty well.
• 21:48
  Amazon has millions of third-party sellers, but you go to amazon.com, you talk to Amazon customer support, Amazon owns ninety percent of that data, and it shows u-up in an Amazon box. We are very much Shopify.
• 21:58
  Shopify is tools and infrastructure that sits in the background, and when you're browsing online and going to these different websites, you may not even know that they're hosted on Shopify, and they don't care.
• 22:08
  The same way that you might be consuming content from a lot of our content creators and not even know that they're hosted on Beehiiv. We want to be the invisible infrastructure in the background.
• 22:17
  It's a philosophical difference, but I think it trickles down to a lot of other decisions that we make.
• 22:21
  You alluded to this before we started recording, but as far as Substack moving more towards a social platform, that is what it means to own the customer relationship and be the destination for consumers.
• 22:31
  We are definitely not building a social platform. We, again, want to be tools and infrastructure to help all of our content creators and businesses scale and succeed. I love that analogy. Um, [chuckles]
• 22:41
  that actually, as we were talking about this, it made me think about, um... I got a text from my mom. She's, like, subscribed to a handful of, uh, email newsletters on Substack.
• 22:49
  She texts me, and she's like, "They keep on pushing the app. I don't wanna be in an app. I just, like, wanna get my emails." And it's, like, just such a clear...
• 22:56
  The thing that they're trying to do is create profiles on an app. Totally. Create the social media feed. It's a whole different thing. Yeah. As, like, a founder, like, I, I, I see the playbook.
• 23:04
  I, I understand their strategy. And, and in- Yeah... a way, it's, like, kind of smart.
• 23:07
  I just don't think it's good for creators or, or anyone who's creating content on the platform 'cause there's misaligned incentives between them.
• 23:15
  If you were to say, "Hey, I wanna build the next big social platform 'cause we raised at a billion dollar valuation, and we wanna take users away from Twitter and Threads and Blue Sky and become the next one of that for consumers," you'd be like, "Holy shit, that's really hard to do."
• 23:27
  But if I were to back into how to do that, I would get all of these large content creators that are already emailing millions or hundreds of thousands of people every week.
• 23:35
  We would then intermediate, and then we'd get all of them to download this app as the way that that's the only... That's the preferred way to consume that content.
• 23:41
  And you kind of backdoor your way into a social network on the backs of those people that you've recruited to use the platform.
• 23:47
  But, like, once they've downloaded the app, that's, like, not your user anymore or your reader.
• 23:51
  That's their user to dictate what they want to promote in-app, what push notifications they wanna send, what content that they wanna show, and I think that is a slippery slope that people have learned time and time again with Google, Facebook, Instagram, and the other platforms.
• 24:04
  So the last thing that folks from our community, uh, asked in, in this interview, uh, for me to ask you was your newsletter tips. What separates the ones that are growing really fast versus the ones that stall out?
• 24:17
  Um, nothing, like, sexy. Like, the first five things that are important: content, content, content, content, content.
• 24:23
  If you view it from, like, a growth funnel, if you're amazing at acquiring new subscribers but your current subscribers just keep churning out, you're going to plateau naturally and, like, never actually hit the growth and, and reach the scale that you want to.
• 24:33
  The way that you prevent readers from churning out is by creating high-quality content that's differentiated, that they can't find elsewhere, that they look forward to receiving.
• 24:41
  I have handfuls of newsletters I look forward to getting all the time. You have to create that behavior and that expectation of quality content. That's, like, always first and foremost.
• 24:51
  There's, like, other nuances to it too. Things that I think are underrated is, like, design.
• 24:55
  I think so many emails look like shit, and to actually invest a little bit of time and effort into making yours look different and interesting does add a lot of value for both just, like,
• 25:07
  user experience and standing out in the inbox Once you have the content part down, finding ways to grow the newsletter, and it doesn't have to be paid acquisition.
• 25:15
  It could be a referral program, which I think has, like, diminished in, in effectiveness a bit since peak Morning Brew days. Um, but it could be, uh, swapping with other newsletters. It could be doing cross-promotions.
• 25:26
  It could be doing webinars, posting on social every day. There's a lot of ways to grow your audience, um, but I do think email's the most durable over a lot of these different social platforms.
• 25:35
  Is there anything that people who are writing newsletters constantly overrate or anything that they underrate in terms of like, "Oh, I gotta be doing this."
• 25:43
  Um, and it's like, "Ah, well, that actually isn't that helpful." Uh, underrate, I, I already kind of alluded to design. The other one is maybe frequency.
• 25:50
  Some people are like, "I'm just gonna send it whenever it's ready." Like, I, I admire- Mm-hmm...
• 25:54
  some people and, like, these are, like, usually more successful post-exit founders who are kind of like, just have an audience or whatever, and can be like, "I only write things when something really inspires me to write things," and it might be, like, once a month.
• 26:05
  It could be once every three months. Unless you're in that camp, I think most people just need to build a expected consumer behavior. I read this book on growth or habits.
• 26:16
  I forgot what the book was, but it, it, it talked about how Kit Kat's marketing campaign around Give Me a Break was so effective because whenever someone went on a break, naturally the association was, like, "Oh, shit, I should buy a Kit Kat."
• 26:28
  So that's why we added the coffee mug to the Morning Brew subject line, 'cause I wanted someone to think every time that they're grabbing coffee in the morning like, "Oh, shit, I haven't read Morning Brew yet."
• 26:37
  But that's just, like, an example of the associations and, like, trying to build some sort of consumer behavior and reliability with the frequency of your sends.
• 26:45
  That's so funny that potentially the episode, uh, that we just recorded earlier this week is, uh, we were breaking down the difference in, like, an editorial schedule versus, like, how broadcasters think about it in terms of, like, media habits and, like, we want this to be an email that somebody reads over their morning coffee, being really cognizant of, like, what...
• 27:02
  Not just saying, "Hey, I wanna send this once a week," but what is the mindset? When are we sending this versus, like, what is our reader's mindset?
• 27:08
  What do we want this to be paired with, and, and how important that can be, um, in kind of creating that recurring habit. Uh- Totally... that's, that's very timely.
• 27:15
  So last question here, and, and this is a question that we like to ask all of our guests that come on.
• 27:20
  You've already alluded to it a little bit, um, when you were talking about kind of where you think storytelling is going in the content marketing world.
• 27:27
  But if you were a B2B content marketer right now, what skill would you be most focused on developing? Yeah. It's a great question. [laughs] I already kind of, like, hammered the content part, right?
• 27:40
  I think that's kind of assumed with the job. But I almost think it's gotten more difficult with the proliferation of AI.
• 27:46
  Another random example that I had in this presentation, Cava, the Mediterranean fast casual place, which I love, they launched this series called Bowl Mates, where it's, like, a dating show where they're both eating, like, Cava bowls.
• 27:58
  I don't know, very, very interesting, different content to, like, break out of, like, the normal marketing and, and content that they're typically doing, and I think brands need to continue to push the limits of, like...
• 28:08
  Obviously, SEO has taken quite a hit, and I think those days of posting on a blog and assuming that's gonna drive tons of customers is probably gone.
• 28:16
  So, like, what actually breaks out, ignoring the company aspect, as just high-quality content that will grab people's attention, that will make people want to consume more content from you, which ultimately in the long game, six months later, that sale actually happens, which is why I, I'm such, like, a big admirer of HubSpot's initiative, right?
• 28:33
  You can run Google and Meta ads all day long trying to get people to sign up for, like, a $50,000 HubSpot account.
• 28:38
  But by taking the long stance and building content through The Hustle and all of their media properties, knowing that that's going to take three, six, nine, 12 months before they have the brand affinity or are even in market for a CRM.
• 28:52
  But when they are in market for a CRM, HubSpot's the first company they're going to think about because they've been consuming their content regularly without being overly sold.
• 28:59
  Um, I think it takes a really mature and sophisticated marketing org to do something like that, and I think that's the way that things are moving. We talk about this a lot.
• 29:05
  I mean, I think there's, there's a lot of, like, acknowledgement of, like, oh, the HubSpot model, the media model. Yeah.
• 29:11
  And, um, everybody that's, like, at a smaller startup, a marketer of one at a Series A [laughs] startup, they're like, "How do, what does the small version of this look like?
• 29:19
  How do we build out, like, the, the kind of foundation of, of what that could become?" It's a conversation we're having a lot of. Tyler, thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.
• 29:30
  [upbeat music]