Oct 25, 2023 · 1h 25m · founders-journal
How Tyler Denk Took Beehiiv from 0 to $750,000/month in 2.5 Years
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview on Founders Journal, Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman sits down with Beehiiv co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk to unpack how Beehiiv scaled from an initial concept to $750,000 in monthly revenue. Tyler shares actionable insights on pragmatic product development, hiring full-stack talent, building in public, and the personal evolution required to lead high-growth venture-backed startups.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Alex holds 28.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Alex as informed peer 4.2 Guest teaching 2.9 Guest disagreement 0.0 Alex pushing back 0.1
speaking balance: gold is Alex, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 46:35 Engineering team rejecting CEO compromises
Tyler candidly describes internal resistance where the engineering team firmly pushed back against his CEO urge to lower hiring bars for speed.
Hardest push from Alex ▶ 43:22 Questioning all-full-stack engineering staffingAlex challenges Tyler's engineering setup by questioning whether relying exclusively on full-stack talent is unorthodox and difficult to sustain.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 57:00 Weekly release cadence originated from insecurityTyler reframes the narrative around Beehiiv's celebrated release cadence, explaining it was actually defensive overcompensation for massive feature gaps against Mailchimp.
Alex holds their own ▶ 1:23:58 Alex references death tech market landscape and investmentsAlex demonstrates subject matter knowledge by referencing Andrew Wilkinson's portfolio investments and a New York interview studio startup tackling life memorialization.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Alex as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Alex pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tyler Denk's Early Journey from College to Morning Brew | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Alex opens with familiar banter about their Morning Brew history and asks Tyler to summarize his journey from college into tech and media. | |
| Why Tyler's First Startup VentureStorm Failed | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler outlines the economic flaws of VentureStorm, targeting students who lacked capital and trying to monetize one-off co-founder matchmaking. Alex effectively synthesizes the marketplace model trap. | |
| Choosing Morning Brew Over Corporate Life at Deloitte | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler reflects on choosing high-upside startup impact at Morning Brew over Deloitte and transitioning from Google to Beehiiv after de-risking with an MVP and seed funding. | |
| Navigating Founder Salaries and Seed Capital | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Alex asks how founders should determine compensation from seed rounds without appearing greedy. Tyler argues that underpaying oneself creates harmful financial distractions. | |
| The Origins of Beehiiv from Morning Brew's Inbox | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Tyler explains how daily reader inquiries about Morning Brew's custom referral system revealed a market void for purpose-built newsletter tech. | |
| Defining the Minimal Viable Product for Beehiiv | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler clarifies that Beehiiv launched without its signature referral program, shipping only a basic text editor and web archive to validate core utility. | |
| Beehiiv's Business Snapshot and Ecosystem Expansion | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Tyler provides an extensive overview of Beehiiv's 45-person team, $750k MRR, Boost ecosystem, and long-term programmatic ad network ambitions. | |
| Validating the Ad Network Manually Before Automating | 5 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler explains how running the ad network manually as an internal agency for eight months prevented engineering waste. Alex praises this disciplined crawl-walk-run approach. | |
| Early Hiring Strategy, Contract-to-Hire, and Role Evolution | 5 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler discusses relying on contract-to-hire arrangements and transitioning from generalists wearing four hats to hyper-focused specialists post-Series A. | |
| Engineering Velocity Through Full-Stack and Design-Minded Talent | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Tyler explains that hiring full-stack, design-oriented engineers eliminates handoff latency, admitting his engineering team pushed back when he tried to compromise hiring standards. | |
| Building in Public and Creating Customer Social Proof | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Tyler details how answering every DM and amplifying user milestones created an organic flywheel of social proof and brand affinity on Twitter. | |
| Product Release Cadence and the Weekly Blitz Strategy | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Tyler reveals that weekly feature drops originated from insecurity over Mailchimp's feature advantage and explains how they package releases with tutorials and videos. | |
| Cultivating Remote Culture and Operating Rhythms | 5 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler details remote operational mechanisms including Sunday deep-dive emails and twice-weekly 45-person all-hands meetings. Alex reflects on Morning Brew's mistake of delaying People Ops. | |
| Founder Evolution and Relentless Time Prioritization | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler explains why he rejects 95% of investor meeting requests and podcasts, emphasizing that execution builds far more investor hunger than relationship coffees. | |
| Lessons in People Management, Feedback, and Terminations | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler identifies people management as his toughest area, sharing how an early blindsided termination taught him to establish continuous, transparent performance feedback. | |
| Leading Through Crisis: The Passing of Andrew Blackton | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tyler recounts the devastating passing of CTO Andrew Blackton, navigating personal grief while projecting decisive wartime CEO leadership to keep the company afloat. | |
| The Drivers of Motivation: Competition, Family, and Freedom | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Tyler outlines his blend of intrinsic drive, family financial security, and fierce athletic competitiveness. Alex explains why he categorizes Tyler as a 'blank check' founder. | |
| Exploring Taboo Markets: Time Capsules and Death Tech | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Tyler pitches a concept for preserving digital time capsules celebrating deceased loved ones in their youth. Alex contributes specific examples of venture-backed death tech startups. |
Statements from this episode (33)
Denk: Targeting customers without money is a bad way to make money
“I mean, just like a big thing for entrepreneurs in general, targeting a core user that doesn't have money is not a great way to make money.”
Denk: Co-founder matchmaking is hard to monetize because success happens once
“It's hard to monetize matchmaking for co-founders because if you do it well, it happens once.”
Denk: Early startup roles offer unique impact over corporate jobs
“You could be one of 20,000 people at Deloitte in that exact same role, or you could be one of one, the only person building what you're building at Morning Brew and make a real difference.”
Denk: Beehiiv secured seed funding before founders went full-time
“We secured a seed round right before going all full time on that.”
Denk: Starting an email platform requires $50k to $80k in upfront vendor contracts
“There's a lot of fixed costs associated with like having an email vendor. Like if you want to do it right, there was like upfront contracts at 50, 80,000 dollars a year, which we couldn't front.”
Denk: Founders paying themselves starvation wages harms executive focus and performance
“And so what I don't believe in at all is like, hey, pay yourself nothing and really prove like you're some harder that can live off like 25,000 dollars a month. Because at the end of the day, like as an entrepreneur, You want to make sure that all of your focu…”
Denk: Side consulting to pay personal bills distracts founders from scaling
“I know some entrepreneurs that actually get into, like, kind of pivoting their business to do consulting as well. And they kind of phrase it as, I'll do consulting to learn about the space a bit more, but it's really kind of to pay the bills. And I think it's …”
Denk: Beehiiv co-founders took $100k-$125k salaries after $2.6M seed raise
“I think my initial salary is like, 101 25, I think, when we raised our seed round. And then for transparency, we raised 2.6 million. So me and my two co-founders all had the same salary of between 101 25.”
Denk: Morning Brew got 10 to 15 daily inquiries about custom tech
“Every time we sent an email to a million people, we'd get 20, 30,000 responses back which is also very overwhelming, but it's an amazing touchpoint with your target readers and audience of what's working, what's not. I'd say 80% of those emails were about the …”
Denk: Morning Brew spent four months custom-building its referral system
“When I would respond, actually, we spent like four months building this custom. There is no off the shelf solution that also showed not just interest, but like a lack of a competitor in the market that was solving that pain point.”
Tyler Denk: Beehiiv's public launch MVP had only three core features
“So RMVP was simply the most basic website builder you could possibly imagine. It does two things. It collects emails, and it posts, and it publishes all of your published posts in an archive. And then the other component is a text editor that you can send emai…”
Denk: Beehiiv generates $750,000 monthly revenue with 45 remote employees
“So right now we are 45 full time employees. We're totally remote. We're across eight different countries. I believe right now we are coming up on our second year anniversary since launching. So we launched November of 2021. We have, we're doing about 750,000 d…”
Denk: Beehiiv sends 700 million emails per month
“So we're now sending about seven hundred million emails a month.”
Denk: Beehiiv raised $16.7 million across seed, extension, and Series A
“So we raised 2.6 million in our seed round, which was in the summer of 2021. And then we went full time shortly after raising that round. We did an extension round of 1.6 million the following May, June. So that's May of 2022. And then we raised a formal serie…”
Denk: Beehiiv ad network revenue will greatly exceed SaaS revenue
“I've always said from day one that I believe the ad network revenue should be significantly larger than the SaaS revenue.”
Denk: Most important CEO task is protecting engineering time
“I'd say the most important thing I do is protect the engineer's time and make sure that they aren't building things that are either incorrect or not the most prioritized thing that we should be building.”
Denk: Builders must endure shitty manual processes before automating
“The downside is I think as a lot of product and engineering minded people, they always want the most efficient process. And the thought of having to do something as manual as like scraping emails, sorting them into CSV, trying to find like the right newsletter…”
Denk: Beehiiv's three co-founders spent first 12 months solely coding
“The zero to one is nothing but 12 months of building. So me and my two co-founders were heads down coding for the first 12 months to build the one and the MVP of the product.”
Denk: About a dozen full-time Beehiiv employees started on contract
“I'd say probably about a dozen of our hires now that are full time started on contract. Doing some sort of work for us.”
Denk: Six or seven of Beehiiv's first 10 hires were engineers
“And our first 10 hires, I think six or seven were engineers.”
Denk: Beehiiv employs only full-stack engineers
“We don't have separate front-end and back-end engineers. We have full-stack engineers top of bottom.”
Denk: Beehiiv delayed hiring a product designer for two years
“We didn't hire a product designer until two weeks ago.”
Denk: Hiring lower-quality engineers creates severe bandwidth drag
“It's just such a efficiency and bandwidth drag to have Quote, unquote, lower quality engineers bring down the bandwidth of the team because that requires other engineers to clean up their code or, like, have to review it even, like, more thoroughly.”
Denk: Building in public works because people align with people over brands
“One was, like, I think what you're alluding to is, like, building in public, which I'm a huge fan of for a lot of different reasons, but one in particular is I think people align with people over brands.”
Beehiiv reserves 20% of quarterly product roadmap for user feedback
“And so I'd say it's about eighty-twenty pre-built each quarter and 20% listening to feedback and building there.”
Denk: Traditional ESPs are built for e-commerce, not content newsletters
“And so MailChimp sale through campaign monitor, like a lot of these classic, like traditional ESPs are actually built around e-commerce and marketing, which is probably what most emails use for.”
Denk: Product marketing must focus on user outputs rather than feature functionality
“There's a part of product marketing of being able to break down, like, why does that matter to your core users that don't care about the feature, they care about the output. And so being able to change your marketing to be more value based and output based ver…”
Denk: Beehiiv runs twice-weekly all-hands where all 45 employees speak
“We have two all hands a week. And we also, which is, it's getting to the breaking point, but everyone talks at the audience. We haven't broken it up. We're only the department leads. So for example, on Mondays we do, what's your top priority of the week? And t…”
Denk: Remote startups delay hiring HR due to false assumptions about office issues
“I think the thing that everyone shares is, like, I wish that I hired HR sooner, especially as a remote company. I think there's, like, you typically think HR is, like, problems or, like, arguments or, like, solving different, like, sexual harassment in the off…”
Denk: Focusing on building makes investors hungrier than introductory calls
“If you're heads down building and actually executing the business and growing it, those investors will be that much hungrier to speak to you in the future than if you took a 30 minute call with them now.”
Denk: People management is harder than building software when scaling
“What you realize as you scale a company is like the actual building software and building processes is actually the easiest part of scaling a business at a point. It's the people problem of having people continue to perform at a high level, continue to execute…”
Denk: Every terminated Beehiiv employee was hired via standard interviews
“Everyone that we have fired was like a, we did a few rounds of interviews, gave them an offer. I had no experience of how they handled adversity, communication, how they actually executed and did their job function in like a real setting, just in the hypotheti…”