Why Upstart Beehiiv is Winning

Welcome to a slightly different newsletter edition. Usually I summarise my thoughts from the latest podcast episodes. That will continue, and I’ll also be diving into teams or businesses whose product delivery skills we can learn from, good or bad.

This week I’m reviewing the fast moving newsletter platform Beehiiv. I have a long list of businesses to review, however, I really wanted to start with this company ever since I started using it for my self. In fact this very newsletter is built on the Beehiiv platform, which is how I became even more intrigued by their product delivery and leadership prowess…so let’s get into it!

How it all Began…

Beehiiv was founded in 2021 by Tyler Denk, Ben Hargett, and Jake Hurd, who were early employees at Morning Brew, a highly successful business newsletter that was acquired by Business Insider in 2020.

Morning Brew was built on another email platform, however, they had to integrate with other services or develop in-house solutions to give the team sufficient features to scale. It became apparent that what they were creating at Morning Brew was the makings of a scalable platform focussed on growing newsletter services in a way that had not previously been catered for.

Tyler Denk remains at the helm of Beehiiv as CEO, and key events in their brief history include:

Raised a $2.6M seed funding round in 2022.

Raised a $12.5M Series A funding round in June 2023.

As of September 2023, beehiiv achieved:

• Over 3 billion emails sent from the platform

• 150,000+ publishers using the platform

• 50M unique readers

• $1.75M earned by newsletters on its platform

• 36 full-time employees across 7 countries

• Named the most promising consumer and creator economy startup of 2023 by The Information and Business insider

• Acquired Swapstack, a newsletter ad marketplace, in 2023.

In May 2024 they announced a $33M series B funding round to accelerate their growth further.

In June 2024 they exceeded $10M ARR (annual recurring revenue) for the first time, from $3M a year earlier.

So why is Beehiiv delivering so much and growing at such pace?

Use your own Products 

The term “dogfooding” came from a 1976 TV ad for Alpo dog food, where actor Lorne Green fed the dog food to his own dog. This term has since been used to describe a business or leader that uses they’re own products, to prove its superiority and effectiveness.

The concept has been followed by many companies including Beehiiv, where the CEO not only uses the product by creating the Big Desk Energy newsletter, but takes advantage of it’s full feature set and encourages his team to do the same.

Actively using your own product also enables those delivering features to know exactly what works, what doesn’t work, what is missing and what new features should be prioritised. I believe this approach has helped Beehiiv to stay in tune with market needs, future requirements and achieving product market fit. Accompanied by social media, dogfooding also allows for a high return, low cost medium for promoting the capabilities of your product to the masses.

Know your Users

Beehiiv actively seeks feedback from users through built-in surveys, polls, and direct communication channels. This feedback informs the backlog prioritisation process for new features, and also helps identify items that need to be on the backlog in the first place.

At every level they reach out to their community through social channels such as direct messaging to let you know they are there to help, whilst soliciting any feedback. This approach is taken from the top of leadership and applied across the wider team.

Beehiiv actively monitors discussions on social platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, where users share experiences and suggestions about the product.

Beehiiv applies analytics and user behaviour data to pinpoint friction, understand usage patterns, and prioritise development efforts based on quantitative evidence.

Beehiiv's support team maintains open lines with power users and community leaders to gather detailed feedback through conversations.

The diverse channels of user engagement feeds into rapidly refining the product with new features and improvements that retains existing customers, who feel they are being listened to and understood, whilst promoting acquisition of new users.

Beehiiv also focus on creating a sense of ownership of the platform from customers, by bringing users on the journey with them, not least through incorporating customers into it’s latest funding round.

Agility and Pace

One of the perks of being a startup is the freedom to shape your development lifecycle and delivery methods from the outset, without the baggage of outdated processes and old habits that die hard. The flip side? Team members often juggle multiple roles. Here’s how Beehiiv thrives in this environment:

Embrace Iterative Cycles: Beehiiv adopts an agile approach, breaking down larger features into bite-sized, iterative releases. This enables faster shipping and refinement based on user feedback, ensuring each update produces a tangible feature, which they later publicise widely.

Incremental Rollouts: New features first go to a subset of users, allowing Beehiiv to monitor performance and gather valuable feedback before a full-scale launch. This strategy helps refine features and ensure smoother rollouts.

Seamless Updates: Beehiiv excels at pushing updates and new features directly within the app, avoiding manual upgrades or downtime. This keeps the user experience uninterrupted and continuously evolving.

Leverage Cross-Functional Teams: Beehiiv's product, engineering, and design teams collaborate closely. This synergy fuels rapid ideation, prototyping, and implementation of new features, accelerating innovation.

Automate Testing for Speed: With robust automated testing frameworks, Beehiiv promptly validates new code changes and catches regressions. This boosts the pace of release cycles while maintaining high quality.

Build in Public

It is a common misconception that if you build it they will come, however no matter how good your product is, if nobody knows about it, they will never come. Building in public involves making visible the journey you are on as you develop your product(s).

Building in public can be advantageous as you can increase awareness, engagement and trust in your product over time, however it does come with its drawbacks in that increased visibility exposes your flaws and leaves you open to criticism, or competition being aware of your ideas and replicating them early.

Another benefit of building in public is that it continually forces you to make your product better than the competition and stay ahead, as your innovation is so visible for all to see, including the competition. With that in mind, this approach to managing a product roadmap is best suited to teams that are willing to work at a consistently high pace to stay ahead and able to welcome critique from all areas.

Developer-led, User Obsessed

With a co-founder CEO who is an experienced engineer and Product Manager, creating an earlier version of the product at a former employer, Beehiiv had an inherent advantage. Denk and his core team were able to understand what functionality was needed to scale a newsletter business, what delivery approaches worked and the key skills needed from the outset.

Beehiiv excels in user experience with standout features like a drag-and-drop editor, responsive templates, and smart defaults that streamline the process. This intuitive design helps creators start quickly and stay productive for the long term.

The Beehiiv team ship new features frequently, and are known to prioritise their product backlog and engineering efforts using the following framework:

1. Essential Migration Features: Top priority is given to addressing feedback on missing features that prevent users from migrating to Beehiiv.

2. Existing Feature Enhancements: Next, focus on improving current features based on user feedback about frustrations, friction or gaps in functionality.

3. Unique Differentiators: Lower on the list are features that set Beehiiv apart but not critical to the core user needs.

4. Adaptive Prioritisation: Beehiiv stays flexible, adjusting priorities in real-time based on emerging feedback trends.

Remove Productivity Barriers 

I’m sure we can all identify with the frustration that comes with too many meetings, causing lack of productivity throughout the day, the Beehiiv team felt the same. Denk took action by designating every Wednesday as a no meeting day. On that day nobody was to set up or accept internal meetings and all were encouraged to use this as an opportunity to maximise deep work and productivity.

The team got on board and saw immediate results including reducing the time for new releases to be shipped, enabling them to better serve customers. It was so successful that no meeting days were moved to twice per week (Tuesdays and Thursdays).

Being bold enough to take action and set an example as a leader was important to make the new ways of working happen, and equally the team’s ability to embrace change head-on allowed them to move out of their comfort zone and try something new, which later became a preferred way of working across the startup.

Finding a time that works for you but not for the majority is a hack that Tyler called his “Cheat code” to productivity. He often works late on a Friday evening when most people have packed up for the weekend, so that he can think clearly and work solidly without distraction. Some might instead benefit from working earlier on a specific weekday or something different, but the key is to find a space and time where you can be productive without distraction from others.

On a personal note, I can easily get caught up in planning meetings about planning meetings, or feeling the need to attend a meeting just to be sure my expectations are being met. The moment I communicate clearly my expectations, trust my teams to own their work calling on me when needed, my productivity significantly improves, and the team feel more empowered.

Educate and Inform

Although the platform is straightforward to use, Beehiiv uses social media content not only to market its products, but also for education, by regularly releasing tutorials and blogs in particular to make sure users are aware of new features and shown how to apply them. This increases the likelihood that features will be used and promotes stickiness with the platform, due to users becoming ever more reliant on the platform as they discover features that meet their newsletter, blog and website hosting needs.

Aside from promotion and education, Beehiiv ensures they place their users at the centre of the story, helping them to know their audience and ideal customer personas. They do so by promoting creators who have had success on the platform, which resonates with existing or potential users to encourage them to get started, or keep going.

By making their users the heroes of the story, it acts as social proof for others who may otherwise not consider using the platform, knowing that someone just like them is gaining value from the product.

Vertically Integrate

Beehiiv is laser-focused on solving the entire workflow for newsletter creators from writing and designing, to publishing, growing an audience and monetising. By vertically integrating all these capabilities into one platform for creators at any level, Beehiiv provides a simplified solution that significantly reduces the barriers to entry and enables seamless integration between functions. Democratising what was once a relatively complex activity, increases the addressable market and overall adoption.

As an example, after the iPhone launched in 2007, it soon became apparent that one device could replace several devices (camera, browser, music, alarm clock, etc) and it’s premium pricing became more justifiable as the overall cost saving and convenience made it a compelling proposition. Beehiiv’s platform to brings a similar proposition to its intended audience, albeit on a different scale.

That’s it for this edition. Look out for a new podcast and newsletter review next week.

If you want more delivery leadership tips with experienced guests, you can find the latest podcast episodes of the Change Leaders Playbook by audio on Spotify, Apple, Audible and video on Youtube.

Cliff

P.s. I’m having a lot of fun creating this newsletter. If you’re interested in starting your own, go here to get 20% off the first 3 months.

(Disclaimer: I may also benefit from referring Beehiiv, which helps to support running the podcast and newsletter)