The Ledger
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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: 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…”
beehiiv constantly builds at least six features simultaneously via full-stack engineers
“Because individual engineers can own this entire process end to end, we are constantly building at least a half dozen new features at any given time.”
beehiiv previously had every engineer answer support tickets every morning
“Three, we used to have every engineer directly answer support tickets for an hour or two each morning.”
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: Beehiiv delayed hiring a product designer for two years
“We didn't hire a product designer until two weeks ago.”
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: 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…”
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: 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: 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: 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 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: Beehiiv's founding CTO served for eight months before his death
“Our CTO, who I mentioned earlier, was our CTO for about eight months, and, like, genuinely, like, the greatest guy, so smart unicorn engineer.”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Beehiiv sends 700 million emails per month
“So we're now sending about seven hundred million emails a month.”
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'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.”