The Exchanges

Q hive has become, even though it's such a crowded space. But I, I, before we get into kind of how you've done that, I want people to have a snapshot of the business today. So can you just kind of describe what does the business look like today? And then take me through kind of like The core metrics that you're most focused on and your team's most focused on.

A Yeah, for sure. 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 dollars a month in revenue. It's about 85% SAS revenue to break down our business and like how we make money. We are SaaS primarily, so like any of these other newsletter providers that you're used to, we charge a flat rate monthly fee based on how many subscribers you have. We're extremely affordable, so we have a free plan, a 49 dollar a month plan, and a 99 dollar a month plan. If you have under a 100,000 subscribers, you're on the 99 dollar plan that comes with every feature from the referral program, growth tools, monetization tools. Above a 100,000 subscribers. We have enterprise, but that's like more bespoke, um, but still like by far the most cost efficient solution in the market. Um, the core product itself, what it does, it's a little bit of expanding on what I just kind of hit on, but you go to create content, you send a newsletter, we host a website. It's much more advanced than what we went to market with. So there's tons of different layouts and customizations, both on the website side and on the email side. We have growth tools to help you scale your newsletter from the referral program, very …

AI assessment note: “we are 45 full time employees... doing about 750,000 dollars a month in revenue”

Q so you guys have a good foundation for his story and, like, the origins of Beehive, but I really want to focus this on kind of what he's learned, uh, around building early stage companies, uh, that can help you build your early stage company, uh, So let's just, uh, set the foundation for a few minutes. Give, um, give your short story. So like, what, what is your story?

A Cool. Short story. I went to the University of Maryland, did technology entrepreneurship minor, studying mechanical engineering, taught myself how to code while in school. While in school and teaching myself how to code, me and two co-founders built a company called VentureStorm. It helped connect entrepreneurs and startups to software developers, ideally on the same campus. So the thinking was a lot of really smart business school students, very entrepreneurial, a lot of really great computer science students looking for opportunities. Let's connect them on the same campus. Campuses are known to be like a big entrepreneurial hub from everything from like Stanford and Harvard and everything else that you hear. Um, that was not a wildly successful startup, but got my feet wet in terms of what does it take to actually build something from zero to one? How do you take nothing? Talk to users or potential users, understand Their pain points, what would solve their problems, and then turn that into a product via code, and then market with more or less no budget whatsoever. So as students, we weren't venture-backed. We didn't have any money. We created content on Medium, on Quora, found any way that we could basically grow our user base, and sponsored hackathons, showed up to everything from University of Michigan to University of Harvard, sleeping on dorm room floors, trying to get i…

AI assessment note: “Short story. I went to the University of Maryland, did technology entrepreneurship minor”

Q their wallet to pay for it. Um, I want to talk about the two times that you left, let's call it corporate jobs. Well, one time you didn't even go into a corporate job. The other time you actually left a corporate job. How easy or hard was the decision of not going to Deloitte and joining the brew? Like when you were trying to go through that decision-making process?

A Yeah, and so I kind of skipped over that part in like my quick backstory, but basically during the summer while I was doing contract work with Morning Brew, I was applying for full-time jobs, partially because there was like no guarantee that Morning Brew was going to be a full-time job, partially because Austin, when I visited New York, said he was looking at ex-Google and Facebook engineers to hire at the brew, and I was like, well, that's definitely not me. So I just assumed that that wasn't in the cards. Um, so I was applying for different jobs that entire summer. Got a full-time offer to do technology consulting at Deloitte. Um, really, I mean, a lot of people from the University of Maryland, especially in engineering, just kind of filter into Washington, D.C. tech consulting jobs. And so that was a good opportunity. I had a girlfriend that lived in D.C. I had an apartment and a friend and, like, a good, well-paying, secure job. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received from another friend named Austin, actually, was when I was weighing between the two opportunities, he was like, 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. And so I think everyone has a different appetite of risk. For me, doing something where I wasn't compl…

AI assessment note: “when I was weighing between the two opportunities, he was like, You could be one”

Q have, like, a full ad revenue stream in addition to SaaS. One, um, one question, and then I want to kind of talk through what's gotten you to this point, is in your best case scenario, does the advertising business, because of the network you're building, end up being bigger than the, the actual SaaS revenue, or, you Do you, like, do you have a point of view on that?

A Yeah, I've always said from day one that I believe the ad network revenue should be significantly larger than the SaaS revenue. Right now, that's not the case. I think 80, 85% of our revenue is SaaS, but that's because a few things. One, the ad network we launched, I'd say about like eight months ago, we started off, the ad network itself had an MVP, which was an MVP for a while. We were basically running an agency internally, so we knew all the newsletters, we knew all of their metrics, we knew who was advertising. We then went in the market to advertisers being like, hey, do you want to advertise? Same pitch to the advertisers, but the way in which we were actually facilitating the ads was just our COO emailing the newsletter saying, here's an opportunity for an ad. This is how much they're willing to pay. If they said yes, we would just email them the copy and the link, and then we would manually go into their account later, pull all the metrics, send it back to the advertiser. So it's basically an agency with the advantage of we had all the first party data and access to the newsletters who were monetizing And I mean, again, the pitch to the advertisers was the same. We ran that for about eight months. So proof of concept, I mean, interest on both sides, very obviously. So that hypothesis was confirmed. Simultaneously, while doing that MVP, we were building the tech to faci…

AI assessment note: “I believe the ad network revenue should be significantly larger than the SaaS revenue.”

Q Totally. Um, okay, a few more questions for you, and then I'll let you enjoy, uh, Costa Rica. Um, what has been the hardest conversation you've had to have in the two and a half years of running the business? Single hardest conversation.

A Yeah, honestly, probably the hardest conversation I've had in my life was after Andrew Placken passed away. So our CTO, who I mentioned earlier, was our CTO for about eight months, and, like, genuinely, like, the greatest guy, so smart unicorn engineer. Um, Um, it's also really hard. I think obviously there's the emotional aspect and the personal aspect of having a friend pass away is the first time that's ever happened to me. And then it's very difficult to pull apart the personal aspect of that with like the business aspect as shitty as it is because he was like the most important person on our team. And so going from a small tight knit team of eight people, and like we finally started to hit product market fit and escape velocity. To him passing away on a Friday over the weekend, and then you kind of go back to work on Monday, business as usual, but it's not business as usual. So I'd say showing up to that first all hands on Monday, where there's like only eight of us on the team, and now we're seven. And there's also like a one, it's like, obviously terrible situation. But there's also a panic of like, now what, because there's so much confidence of, I mean, it's a classic peacetime wartime CEO to the extreme of like a small company that Is very limited in resources. We don't have, like, a ton of domain and expertise sharing across the company. Like, he owned mission critic…

AI assessment note: “hardest conversation I've had in my life was after Andrew Placken passed away.”

Q saw like you, um, you put out on X the Six days ago, you guys were like number one most promising consumer startup on the information. Like, there's just like a lot of buzz, pun intended, around the brand right now. How, I have thoughts on why that is, but what is kind of your estimation of intentional choices you have made that have led to being in the zeitgeist?

A Yeah, it's a very loaded question because there's a lot of things that I think I've done, some consciously, some unconsciously, to be able to make that happen. 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. And I never necessarily wanted to be the face of Beehive, but I thought there was something interesting in being able to tell our story to attract early users and be the face where, partially because we didn't have a customer support function, so they could just DM me and come to me, but partially because we knew where our users were. A lot of our early adopters were on Twitter. That's somewhere that I'm confident in writing thought pieces or tweets about what's working, what's not working, how we're growing, how we're prioritizing different things. And so I have kind of become a face of a brand and sharing our success. Um, I've also like relentlessly answered every single DM possible from LinkedIn and Twitter. Because I think, again, early days, it's a super competitive space. I'm doing anything to stand out. And I believe and still believe to this day, if someone's choosing between three different platforms, and I'm in their DMs talking with them, actually hearing out their pain points. And I also have the engineering …

AI assessment note: “One was, like, I think what you're alluding to is, like, building in public”

Q about what to pay yourself? Like, how, how do you think through, basically, you know, you have to tell an investor use of funds. You, like, know you need to take care of your lifestyle so you're not, like, stressed about that every day versus building your business, but also you don't want to come off as, like, greedy and living a bougie lifestyle. How do you find the balance?

A Yeah, it's tough for sure because I think a lot of people are trained to want to, like, almost show off the fact that they're not taking a huge salary because it's, like, I'm investing all my time, all the money into the business. At the end of the day, it's like an opportunity cost like anything else. Like, you know, your balance sheet, you know how much you can get by to live like a normal life, and how much you need to have available in the business to invest in, hiring other employees, infrastructure, whatever it is to take your business to the next level. 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 focus and attention are focused on the business and not how are you going to pay rent? How are you, like, you don't want to do X, Y, Z because you don't have enough capital to do so. I think there's something to be said about, like, 99% of my worries are all business focused in life, which could also be a problem, but totally different conversation. But, like, financial is not one of them, so I don't have to worry about, like, should I take, I know some entrepreneurs that actually get into, like, kind of pivoting their business to do consulting as well. And they kind of …

AI assessment note: “know how much you can get by to live like a normal life”

Q pushing yourself? Do you have a sense of it's extrinsic at all? Like you just want to be rich as fuck, or you want to, you know, prove to someone who wronged you in the past, or like there's some chip on your shoulder because of an experience you had. Like, how, how do you think about what are kind of the, the few things that contribute to motivating you?

A Yeah, it's probably all of the above, right? So I am intrinsically motivated because there's so many things I want to do and accomplish. And I think having a successful company, having access to capital, being financially free gives you a lot of opportunities to pursue things that you're passionate about. And I want to do so many different things in my life where I feel like this is like a great way to be on the path to be able to accomplish those different things. There is extrinsic in terms of like money is great. Obviously there's advantageous things about building a successful company and the doors that opens in terms of like personal social life. There is just the competitive nature of, I find like one of the books I loved way back when it was like Mark Cuban's book on like the sport of business, but like I grew up playing sports from basketball, soccer, whatever. And the fact that business is so competitive, And, like, there are winners, there's losers. Like, you can outwork someone, you can outthink someone, you can outstrategize people. I think it's just something that I've always been extremely hyper-competitive and wanting to be the best at what I do. And, at the end of the day, business is, like, real numbers. Like, there's a scoreboard, and if there's a way that we can build one of the most successful companies in our industry, I think it's, like, a very fun challen…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it's probably all of the above, right? So I am intrinsically motivated”

Q that has enabled the business to grow as well. First one is how do you think you have changed as a founder, um, from let's call it like when you last co-founded a business, which was VentureStorm to now. Um, what do you think is different about just like the way your, your brain thinks or, um, how you're running this business that is setting everything up for more success?

A I think as a founder, you have to be very good at protecting your time and prioritizing. I think early days, both in my career and starting the business, anytime someone somewhat interesting wanted to talk to me, I thought that was the coolest thing. I was like, of course, I'll take a 30 minute call. And like, maybe there's some world where we can help each other out or you can provide value. Um, what has changed a lot is I say no to like 95% of things. You asked earlier about like this podcast that I've been on a decent amount of podcasts. I actually say no to probably 90% of podcasts. The ones I say yes to are either because they have a large audience. I think the halo effect of being able to tell my story and communicate and get in front of net new people could lead to more business. So strategic and audience size, or a lot of times are like beehive users and just like going through the narrative of being to support our own users. I'll go on the podcast to support them. But I don't know if one of the things that I do, I feel like somewhat unconventional is a lot of investors reach out as we've had more and more success of Hey, would love to develop the relationship. Like, let's get 30 minutes on the calendar. Decently, big name investors. And I relentlessly just go, we're heads down building right now. If I said yes to every meeting that came across my plate, then no one wou…

AI assessment note: “What has changed a lot is I say no to like 95% of things.”

Q while also building really scalable backend tech. Like, it just sounds very, very difficult while you're also competing against much larger, better funded tech companies. Is there any kind of, like, Method to the madness on how you've gone about recruiting that's either different or something you haven't seen companies do, or you just like the world's best, uh, salesperson for engineers. Like what, what's allowed you to do that?

A Definitely not the world's best. I'd say it took us, I mean, we're constantly looking for top talented engineers. It's taken us two years to get the 12 engineers that we have. And so it, I mean, we, and I, I owe a ton of credit to our early engineering team. There were times where I was like, hey, we need to move faster. We need to hire engineers. Here's someone who I think is good enough. And they always push back being like, I don't think they're the perfect fit for X, Y, Z reason. To which me as like the CEO trying to push out features and promise all these things to our users that are coming, but they're not coming because we don't have enough bandwidth to build them, would always get super frustrated. Like, don't you think this person's good enough to hire? And they were pretty relentless in being like, 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. And so, yes, it sounds like we do have a bunch of unicorns in our team, and they're great, but it took us two years of, like, slowly adding one engineer a quarter to find it.

AI assessment note: “I owe a ton of credit to our early engineering team”

Q like product. How do you like, how do you maintain such a rapid product cadence? And is there actually like, are there milestones you set for how often you want to be, uh, improving features to be able to announce them to the world? And then is there like a marketing blitz package that you have every time you do one of these? Talk about that a little bit more.

A Yeah, I'd say a few things. So on the product side, we have a quarterly roadmap that I set aside every quarter. So at the end of Q two, we're preparing the Q three roadmap. It's high level, what I call epics, which are tenfold features that do not currently exist, or initiatives of making one feature 10 times better by doing X, Y, Z. So I'd say we have about 80% of the roadmap mapped out of exactly what we want to build in the upcoming quarter. Which is then broken down like the smaller pieces of in order to launch feature X, we have to do feature Y first because it unblocks this. And then I'd say we leave about like 15 to 20% open for feedback where whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, or users writing into support, there's constantly different use cases that we are understanding that we need to improve on. And it's been our core advantage going back to what we were just talking about to be able to listen to users, make them feel heard, and prioritize what they want us to build. And so I'd say it's about eighty-twenty pre-built each quarter and 20% listening to feedback and building there. In terms of, like, the hype cycle, that, again, came from, like, very early days. We had four engineers and, like, the only thing we could do was ship product. And a lot of it actually comes from the insecurity of day one, we had the least features of any given product. So how do you take a user …

AI assessment note: “we have about 80% of the roadmap mapped out of exactly what we want”

Q work. But also I think we were lucky in a lot of ways. Um, when you think about finding kind of like Your version of Tyler Dank within Beehive in the early days, how did you try to find those people? And even if you like, think about who are your, uh, few best early employees, what are kind of the, like the, the patterns you identify in those people?

A Yeah, I'd say there's a few things. One, like me and my two co-founders are all technical. So our core founding team were three engineers who you kind of have to like, same way you would hire in terms of priority and like what needs to get done today. The first thing you need to do is like build the actual product. And the fact that we didn't like bring on people who might be good at marketing and partnerships in the future, but like 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. Um, I think in terms of like having an ownership mentality, I think you kind of hit it on the head in terms of like the contract to hire something I'm a huge fan of. 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. Um, but with, like, I think it de-risks entirely, right? You get to see exactly how they work. You get to see how they communicate in Slack, how they respond to feedback, and what they would be before you actually go through the process of offering a full-time job. Um, so we've done that with a ton of hires. And then also, like, equity is kind of like the startup, like, golden nugget that I think everyone talks about. Um, that's, like, what really does turn employees into owners, quite literally.…

AI assessment note: “about a dozen of our hires now that are full time started on contract”