Subversive

How beehiiv’s Referral-Powered Growth Engine Propelled It to $30M+ ARR

• Phil Carter • Season 1 • Episode 41

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 1:02:50

"If you wait until it's perfect, you're too late."

This was Tyler Denk’s attitude when he took the growth engine he had built as employee #2 at Morning Brew - the newsletter he helped scale to >3M subscribers and a $75M acquisition - and productized it into a new startup called beehiiv.

He launched with a fraction of the features his competitors had, but built an entire process around seeking out criticism, using it to inform the company’s product roadmap, and then executing relentlessly to delight beehiiv’s customers.

This ethos, paired with a 0% take rate model that counterpositions beehiiv vs. Substack, has propelled the company to $30M+ in ARR in just a few years, and it's not stopping there.

beehiiv’s recent product launches have taken it beyond newsletters to websites, podcasts, and online communities, positioning it to be the operating system for the entire content economy.

In this episode

  • Why Tyler built beehiiv on a 0% take rate and calls Substack's model "predatory"
  • How building in public has become a secret weapon that propels beehiiv’s growth
  • Features in beehiiv’s recent launch, including Community, Copilot, and a new visual editor
  • Why Tyler believes AI will ultimately make human-created content more valuable

Tyler Denk

Phil Carter