why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public
record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable
ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't;
assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card:
▮▮▮▮▮ certainty ·
▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Denk: Beehiiv delayed hiring a product designer for two years
“We didn't hire a product designer until two weeks ago.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Denk: Beehiiv sends 700 million emails per month
“So we're now sending about seven hundred million emails a month.”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Partly supported
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.”